Customers need to stop buying from companies that are publicly listed. Publicly listed companies are designed for the next quarter - cutting corner is the name of the game.
Also see: Boeing, GE, IBM, and recently Meta products that are basically unusable.
And then venture-backed companies are ticking time bombs that abruptly close shop when they run out of money or are acquired, or at best themselves turn into the publicly traded companies you loathe.
"Good" companies are mostly just a consumer-friendly stage of the investment lifecycle.
But there is a whole another world of companies whose investors are not shooting for next quarter extraction. Their horizons are larger and their returns are calculated beyond FCF and gross margins.
These kinds of companies are the local businesses, trying to upstart and grow for a smaller set of towns around their geographic location.
Obviously not all companies can work with such small scale and such investors. In such cases, stick to non-public ones. At least their horizons are beyond the next quarter.
This is not going to happen. It’s much easier for a smaller group to coordinate than a larger group. It’s the same reason democracy is so easily exploitable. “Just vote them out” and yet the US has been involved in wars for the entirety of many of our lives.
Fixing our culture and installing elites that uphold it is the only answer. Not that those are easy things to do. Religion was how this was done in the past (and is done in other areas).
For example, republicans tend to trust corporations of any size and tend to distrust large government. The opposite is true of Democrats; they tend to want to centralize power in government and tend to distrust large corporations.
The fallacy on both sides is that the problem isn’t the kind of organization, it’s the centralization of power.
Personally I distrust any large group with any sort of power, be it economic or monopoly on use of force or whatever.
The solution for government is “give the government less things to control” - easier said than done but the Constitution laid it out for us.
I have been thinking about solutions for corporations, and I have come up with two ideas:
1. A progressive tax on corporations based on number of employees and/or contractors of any sort contributing to the corporation.
2. A progressive tax on corporations based on economic power, eg market capitalization and/or gross revenue and/or subscribers or interactive users.
Or all of the above.
The idea is to make corporations naturally less profitable as they grow, which would make centralization/monopolization financially unattractive for investors.
In such a tax regime maybe we wouldn’t even need to take antitrust actions anymore as it would become self-regulating if we got the rates right.
Just a thought.
What's worse, any single rule against large corporations will be worked around. You will have a loose association of just-the-right-size corporations. They will find a way to work together as one, while legally being many and each small enough to have small taxes.
Look at the recent software for rent collusion. Without an active powerful government to attack this new invention, they would claim there is no price agreement. Actually they do claim that. There is none formally, but the same effects are somehow achieved. If you want the government to be limited to applying some simple rules, this would go unpunished. This requires the government to adapt and use judgement and discretion.
You need an active powerful entity to balance the power of economic behemoths. We don't appear to have any other way, yet. I think the key is balance.
“Boeing” is a made up idea. Engineering an aircraft is not.
Make HR a government agency, to remove redundancy and extract all gains from a rich minority who aren’t owed the allegiance of 100s of millions and billions across the globe.
American Civic Life: The Story is not one where a handful did all the work, are worth all the prestige. Any one of them dies tonight we all have to move on. This system is so “War is peace.” And plenty of educated geniuses are in on it. If they can’t cope with actual science driven rational take on their value to humanity then more war less peace is what they’ll get. Humans are not philosophy driven they’re biology driven and too many are having their biology strained to the point of snapping