re: #173 Blind Frog Belly White

I think this misplaces the responsibility a bit. Yeah, CEOs, Officers, and Boards of Directors bear responsibility, but the thing is, they’re all just hirelings. Shareholders hire them to make them money. You may punish the hirelings with prison, fines, etc. But the OWNERS who hired them and encouraged the behavior will never lose more than their original investment.

This is how and why corporations were created, to protect the owners from losing more than their original investment. If a Billion Dollar Company does 10 Billion dollars damage, where does the extra 9 Billion come from? You can sell all the assets of the company, default on the bonds and fire all the workers, and the owners just lose whatever they paid for the stock.

Except, nowadays, most “owners” are mutual funds or pension funds that really have little to do with management or the operation of the company. They are people like you and me who have a few thousand dollars in GM or Honda or Apple. We want our 401(k)s to provide us with sufficient money to live out retirement, without worrying about starvation or homelessness. Maybe capitalism is too flawed to continue. I don’t pretend to have any answers for the ideal economic structure that leads to a combination of innovation, environmental protection, and a satisfactory standard of living for all.