IMO especially when stock holders wanting a monetary return on investment are involved. I give my money to the FSF every month, because they provide value to me, but not because I expect them to surreptitiously extract it from others and give it to me as cash dividends.
I think that's one of the big problems with public companies, especially those that have "regular people" as their main money maker (the "consumers") - invariably, the company's needs (duty) to make money for their real customers (the shareholders) will take precedence over what would be "the best thing" for consumers.
I wish we could do away with the whole "public company" thing - just imagine how much better Facebook, Google, and countless other companies (yes, Apple too) would be if they were private, and more accountable to their users.
Privately owned companies are not accountable to their users, they are accountable to their owners, just like publically traded ones. It's just that they have fewer owners, and you sometimes get owners with really nice ideas. Other times, you get even more tyrannical owners.
Instead, what would be really nice is imagining how those companies would fare as worker-owned companies. Especially with these big internet behemoths, where the entire families of all the workers are users, the standard of user care would easily sky-rocket.
The Soviet Union didn't have even 1 worker owned factory, unless you're talking about the time before Lenin ever came to power. The factories were owned by the state, which in turn was owned by a dictator and his political apparatus - workers had less freedom to control the factory than Amazon warehouse workers.
Yes, they were a despicable regime, and unfortunately their name still mars the idea of socialism. They also claimed they were democratic, and surely many believed that as well, but we haven't let that ruin democracy, so we shouldn't let their laughable claims to socialism ruin socialism.
You had like 120 years to create a version of socialism that didn't suck, or didn't degenerate into a form of oligarchy under whatever guise du jour you please. I'd call it a failed experiment by now. You know why?
Because "true socialism" (like your true Scotsman) requires ideal übermenschen on all levels everywhere. This is not how the humankind works. Humankind is full of flawed, sometimes outright malicious people, and you have to deal with that.
Most versions of socialism at some point came up with a need to breed ideal happy socialist people that won't keep breaking their paradise all the time. And until this Übermensch is born, they chose to break and bend the rest into behaving, like bonsai trees. Of course, Dear Leader and their team is exempted from being broken or bent, and many others aspire to become like them. This is how every socialist rule to date grew into a totalitarian oligarchy.
Thank you but no thank you. I'd better choose a form of government that adapts to and deals with people as they are, and doesn't try to force them into some better version according to their understanding.
private companies are still accountable to their shareholders. But I do think that the very public number of share price encourages slightly different behavior than a private, illiquid, and probably out of date number
Yeah not sure what the poster is trying to say here. Both distinctions almost invevitably result in doing anything that is legal to maximize profits (and oftentimes illegal or gray at best). However I haven't seen anyone propose a decent alternative to corporation status for such large entities. The other option is state owned and that is almost always an utter failure. Even China allows their "state owned" businesses a lot of leeway to account for the ups and downs of capitalism and market forces.
