The way all CEOs should be. Publicly-traded companies are a mistake.
I don’t hate the idea of stocks. You invest in a company that needs capital. You own a little piece and get a dividend based of the profits those companies make.
Its the constant growth model, where the value of the stocks have to constantly grow, the “If you are not growing, you are dying mentality.” where the growth of stocks became the value and not the reliability of the dividends they provide.
I always got hung up on that too. It seems to me that the ideal state would be you invest in a company, they make a profit, you get a share of that profit. You can reinvest that in other places, helping more people start their businesses, helping more people find employment and get things done. It’s like economic democracy in action, where people get to decide what businesses are needed through investment. No person on Earth should have the funds to just build a chip fabrication plant, as an example, so crowd sourcing the funding like this makes perfect sense to me.
Where it falls down is in short term greed. I don’t think that the system was intended or can reasonably sustain all the high-speed trading trying to maximize returns not by helping the company succeed but by leeching off of the investment of others. What should have been a way for people to help build things has become a way for a whole industry to extract more money out of the world.
The problem with your comment is thinking capitalism intended anything. The whole idea of capitalism is that perfectly rational actors with perfect knowledge can find the best price for an item. (There are no perfectly rational actors, and knowledge is deliberately obscured.) It doesn’t intend any particular method or outcomes. It is only predicated on the idea that things will just happen to work out.
I agree, investing in a company is fine. It’s when you have the ability to trade your investment without any consequence whatsoever that the madness begins. Investment is supposed to be risky for both the company and the investor! But we’ve managed to externalize that risk into a market in which no single actor can be held responsible when a company is looted and destroyed by greed. Publicly-traded shares are now an entirely tax-free substitute for money - but only for the rich who have turned this system into a game to enrich themselves.
Another issue is that publically traded companies have a legal fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, but there is no legal responsibility to society or ethics. In fact, even laws supposedly designed to constrain businesses only carry fines for the business (and rarelyany responsibilityfor the individuals making the decisions), so it’s more of an ante to sit at the big boy’s table.
This is how incentives are currently structured to play out. If a company makes some money, it can either re-invest it to grow the business or pay it out as dividends. Dividends are taxed as income while capital gains are taxed much lower. This discrepancy in tax rates is explicitly to promote growth.
This is one area I think the left has missed the forest for the trees with the “tax the rich” slogan. The uber-wealthy aren’t uber-wealthy due to high incomes. Steve Jobs famously had a salary of 1$. A higher tax bracket or 2 would barely affect them. You need to tax capital gains as income to actually make a dent. This would also impact a lot of middle-class retirement accounts though so nobody wants to do that. I think a proposal that bolstered social security to make up the difference for retirees should be combined with a proposal to tax all capital gains as income. I haven’t done the numbers, but I bet that the extra tax revenue would more than pay for the extra social security spending.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard people on the left call for taxing capital gains. As long as it’s progressive, like income tax, it shouldn’t hurt the average person much.
Unless the tax rate is similar to income tax rates, it still won’t change the growth > dividends incentive. And it would still be very unpopular because it would lower retirement incomes or make existing retirement accounts last for shorter lengths. Any proposal to change how capital gains works would have to also address retirees’ legitimate concerns in order to be politically viable.
Yeah, that’s why I said it should be progressive, like income tax. It would not effect most people at all, but the people making tons of money from capital gains would face a heavy tax burden.
I believe costco is public
I’m aware of that - I think the famous story about the hot dog price is the CEO talking to the board members. I’m just saying that the Costco CEO is the exception, not the rule, and that’s because the incentives of the publicly traded model reward doing literally anything to make line go up, even if it means literally killing people.
Except the Costco CEO retired years ago. And now Costco is even more greedy than it was.
What about Sam’s Club?
And Arizona iced tea has been $0.99 for 30 years
Not in the last few years. They took the hard price off the can designs and now they’re 1.39-1.69 depending on the place.
Walmart lists them at $1.
The official website also claims they’re still $0.99: https://drinkarizona.com/pages/about-us
I think it’s the fault of the retailer wherever you’re seeing that price.
that’s always been the case, even when they had that shit printed on the can. it’s a matter of the individual retailers doing that. I think there was some system to report them to the company but obviously the arizona tea company doesn’t really have any control over the prices that retailers decide to sell their shit for. which is partially why I think the whole thing that they’re only supposed to cost a dollar everywhere is kind of lowkey just a marketing ploy.
30 years ago, Arizona iced tea was made with cane sugar. Now it’s all high fructose corn syrup.
Only because it’s a loss leader. You know, to help the customers spend more and make the company more profits. That’s a different kettle of fish.
Go get a hotdog come home with a 75" TV. All retailers have loss leaders. I’m a customer, Their prices are generally good. Their store brand is generally excellent. The return policy good, they are fair to good to their employees. I like it
Then there’s me. No membership. Just go inside for the great pizza and hotdog deals.
Jk on them, my most regular receipt is just that hotdog. Walk right through the registers, eat food, leave with nothing else.
It’s a damn good hot dog at an absurd price - on the scale of processed meats, let’s be real.
I do the same with their sundae, well, before they replaced it with their Blizzard like ice cream.
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Apparently the founder threatened to kill the CEO if the CEO raised the price
Downvoting cause ceo proposed to raise the price and it was the founder that influenced his decision to keep it the same.
The message is subtle… But maybe the parasite class will get the hint.
