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Comment by Shorel | Hacker News Reader

They care about money. They definitely care about money. They have achieved a steady cash flow that can sustain their business forever, unless something really bad happens.

What they don't care is the endless growth that MBA guys always try to achieve, and the quarterly profit driven decision making that ultimately destroys their customers loyalty, for short term profit.

A business can be very profitable without being exploitative. It's the people in Wall Street who can't seem to understand this. For them a hundred million dollars of profit is good if last year it was only fifty million dollars, and a dying business if last year it was also a hundred million dollars. It really makes no sense.

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Just thinking out loud, but I wonder if Wall Street would be less awful about ruining companies if we were able to get a more meaningful dividend out of your average company? So perhaps the stock price itself stays relatively flat or boring, but the dividend paid out makes up for it. Or perhaps it would be the exact same issue and they’d be squeezing companies to maximize dividends.

I just know that I expect stock prices to go up because most “dividend stocks” give such a small amount of money per share.

This is the magic of the decentralized, invisible-handed, "free" market. Nobody (in particular) tells you what to do, and (ideally) you reach a canonical equilibrium which may (under some idealised circumstances) be optimal (in some sense).

If ifs and buts were candy and nuts this would be the cat's pyjamas. I shan't deny it's mathematically elegant, and also feels good in many ways, but the real trouble is it's exceptionally hard to form a watertight argument for an alternative.

Put another way, the appeal of the free market isn't so much in its correctness as it is in its simplicity. I can personally attest that it's sumple enough for any fool to understand, in an area of economics where it's devilishly difficult to establish anything solidly.

I say all this as someone who is a big fan of Valve and their work, deapite otherwise being a foss zealot, just because they throw a bone to our sort.

My impression of this is that it is partially a tax policy issue.

Dividends are taxed differently and higher than capital gains. So given a choice between a stock buyback and a dividend, often a buyback makes more sense.

People who are capable of saying "I have enough now" will self-select out of the activist investor class. Automatically, the people with the most power to influence publicly traded companies will be people who demand endless growth.

This sort of thing is why I think we need heavy taxes to limit wealth accumulation. Money is power, and the amount of power a person with ten+ figure wealth wields is too much for any one person to have, let alone one who was never elected.

This is sortof a function of buybacks vs dividends. Like, if the market rewards growth (in terms of share prices) then line must go up forever. If you are getting a steady stream of inflation adjusted cash (i.e. dividends), then you can afford to care less about number go up.

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