[robocat]

> all in the endless pursuit of money

Money is not the goal. Optimisation is the goal. Anything with different internal actors (e.g. a corporation with executives) has multiple conflicting goals and different objectives apart from just money (e.g. status, individual gains, political games, etcetera). Laws are constraints on the objective functions seeking to gain the most.

We use capitalism as an optimisation function - creating a systematic proxy of objectives.

Money is merely a symptom of creating a system of seeking objective gain for everyone. Money is an emergent property of a system of independent actors all seeking to improve their lot.

To remove the problems caused by corporations seeking money, you would need to make it so that corporations did not try to optimise their gains. Remove optimisation, and you also remove the improvement in private gains we individually get from their products and services. Next thing you write a Unabomber manifesto, or throw clogs into weaving machines.

The answer that seems to be working at present is to restrict corporations and their executives by using laws to put constraints on their objective functions.

Our legal systems tend to be reactive, and some countries have sclerotic systems, but the suggested alternatives I have heard[1] are fairly grim.

It is fine to complain about corporate greed (the simple result of our economic system of incentives). I would like to know your suggested alternative, since hopefully that shows you have thought through some of the implications of why our systems are just as they currently are (Chesterton’s fence), plus a suggested alternative allows us all to chime in with hopefully intelligent discourse - perhaps gratifying our intellectual curiosity.

[1] Edit: metaphor #0: imagine our systems as a massively complex codebase and the person suggesting the fix is a plumber that wants to delete all the @‘s because they look pregnant. That is about the level of most public economic discourse. Few people put the effort in to understand the fundamental science of complex systems - even the “simple” fundamental topics of game theory, optimisation, evolutionary stable strategies. Not saying I know much, but I do attempt to understand the underlying reasons for our systems, since I believe changing them can easily cause deadly side effects.

[FrustratedMonky]

This is all correct, and the standard capitalist's party line. What it misses is conflating Money and Optimization. Money is absolutely the complete and only goal, and yes corporation Optimize to make more money. Regulations put guard rails on the optimization. It was only a few decades ago that rivers were catching fire because it was cheaper to just dump waste. There will always be some mid-level manager that needs to hit a budget and will cut corners, to dump waste or cut baby formula with poison, or skip cleaning cycles and kill a bunch of kids with tainted peanut butter(yes, happened).

But, your are correct, there really isn't an answer. Government is supposed to be the will of the people to put structure, through laws/regulation, on how they want to live in a society, to constrain the Corporation. Corporations will always maximize profit and we as a society have chosen that the goal of Money is actually the most important thing to us. So guess we get what we get.

[m4nu3l]

> Money is absolutely the complete and only goal

If that were the case it would be easy to optimize. Just divert all resources to print more money.

[FrustratedMonky]

This did use to happen. IN the 20's, companies could just print more shares and sell them, with no notification to anybody that they had diluted them. Until there were laws created to stop it.

[throw10920]

"ah, the old lets play at being a stickler on vocabulary to divert attention from the point"[1]

Company shares are not money.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35846017

[FrustratedMonky]

So on one hand some argues money is not currency, and then turn around and say shares aren't money, but they are currency. They can be sold for money? right? It seems like splitting hairs to obfuscate the point that humans will commit fraud and destroy the world in order to optimize to make money. Just throwing up technicalities that 'shares' aren't money isn't changing the fact that many companies have their one and only goal to increase share price, which can be converted to money.

[throw10920]

> So on one hand some argues money is not currency

That's not my argument, and also irrelevant to this post.

> say shares aren't money, but they are currency

They're definitely not currency, either.

> They can be sold for money?

That's an asset, not a currency. Those are two very different things.

> It seems like splitting hairs to obfuscate the point that humans will commit fraud and destroy the world in order to optimize to make money.

You were claiming that "companies used to print their own shares = print their own money" in support of your argument "humans will commit fraud and destroy the world in order to optimize to make money". That claim is false, so it doesn't support your argument, and your "point" is not a point because you've provided zero evidence for it.

> isn't changing the fact that many companies have their one and only goal to increase share price

What fact? What number of companies can you point to that factually have their "one and only goal to increase share price"?

I can say for sure that I've never seen a company that doesn't at least have two goals, and your statement is completely irrelevant for privately traded companies.

You seem pretty determined to push your worldview that "companies are evil" without much thought as to what that even means, or producing blatantly false claims like "we as a society have chosen that the goal of Money is actually the most important thing to us" (if you think that, you need to spend more time with real people and less on the internet, because the vast majority of real people do not believe this).

Go read the Gulag Archipelago and tell me how a system without companies or "capitalism" works.

[dragonwriter]

It used to happen with actual currency, too, before the government took and enforced a monopoly on printing it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking

[m4nu3l]

That would be fraud to investors, given investors own the company in a shared manner. If some investor approve printing new shares all investors should be notified. But there are no laws settings how many shares a company can print.

[FrustratedMonky]

Yeah, this used to happen before there were laws. Laws are needed or humans will commit fraud.

[cookingrobot]

You’re sort of reinforcing the point. Only laws prevent companies from running printing presses to print money.

[m4nu3l]

Let me introduce you to free-banking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking that made possible some of the most stable financial systems in history.

[worik]

Money is not currency

[FrustratedMonky]

ah, the old lets play at being a stickler on vocabulary to divert attention from the point. so lets grant the point that we could be using sea shells for currency, and that printed money is a 'theoretical stand in for something like trust, or a promise or other million things that theoreticians can dream up'. It doesn't change any argument at all.

[FrustratedMonky]

To complete my thought. Yes Money is used as an optimization function, its just that we have chosen Money as the Goal of our Money Optimization function. We aren't trying to Optimize 'resources' as believed, that is just a byproduct that sometimes occurs, but not necessarily.

[robocat]

That seems backwards. There is an optimisation system of independent actors, and money is emergent from that. You could get rid of money, but you just end up with another measure.

> we as a society have chosen that the goal of Money is actually the most important thing to us

I disagree. We enact laws as constraints because our society says that many other things are more important than money. Often legal constraints cost corporations money.

Here are a few solutions I have heard proposed:

1: stop progress. Opinion: infeasible.

2: revert progress back to a point in the past. Opinion: infeasible.

3: kill a large population. Opinion: evil and probably self-destructive.

4: revolution - completely replace our systems with different systems. Opinion: seen this option fail plenty and hard to find modern examples of success. Getting rid of money would definitely be wholesale revolution.

5: progress - hope that through gradual improvements we can fix our mistakes and change our systems to achieve better outcomes and (on topic) hopefully avoid catastrophic failures. Opinion: this is the default action of our current systems.

6: political change - modify political systems to make them effective. Opinion: seen failures in other countries, but in New Zealand and we have had some so-far successful political reforms. I would like the US to change its voting system (maybe STV) because the current bipartisan system seems to be preventing necessary legislation - we all need better checks and balances against the excesses of capitalism. I don’t even get a vote in the USA, so my options to effect change in the USA are more limited. In New Zealand we have an MMP voting system: that helped to somewhat fix the bipartisan problem, but unfortunately MMP gave us unelected (list) politicians which is arse. The biggest strength of democracy is voting those we don’t like out (every powerful leader or group wants to stay in power).

7: world war - one group vying for power to enlighten the other group. Opinion: if it happens I hope me and those I love are okay, but I would expect us all to be fucked badly even in the comparatively safe and out-of-the-way New Zealand.