Publicly-Owned Corporations: A Fundamentally Flawed Idea?

Now, I don't want any politically divisive rhetoric here, as I will cry to the heavens (mods) and enforce as I have seen done on this forum for much more ridiculous reasons. I'm not trying to stir anything up here. If there's one thing that I know, it's that I'll never know much. These are just my observations.

That being said I've been thinking about publicly-owned corporations as an idea and I've come to the personal conclusion that they are just another one of those theoretical pipe-dreams that just don't work in practice; not unlike communism or the McRib. The idea of these corporations in society seems to defeat itself whenever I think it through:

The first problem to touch on is the possibility of corporate administration screwing the stockholders. For this, we make the administration have a legal responsibility to raise stockholder value, otherwise stockholders will have no faith in the stock market and the entire thing flops.

This legal obligation, however, forces the primary goal of the company to be turning exponential profits; constantly increasing corporate value to appease stockholders. This, whether soon or eventually, leads to finding cheaper materials for goods, compromising quality of services, lowering pay rates and working conditions, replacing jobs with machinery, and/or forcing work overseas, all of which are not only destructive to the economy, but also destructive to external economies and the well-being of foreign workers.

With such an obligation to turn ridiculous profits, the distribution of wealth is compromised because all of the money is being horded into one sector. With so much money in one area, the money "works for itself"; the most money being generated in the political system generates from a source that is performing the least amount of primary work. Also, those doing the most amount of labor profit the least from it, and those doing the least amount of labor profit the most.

At this point we get stuck with a massive skew because almost all of the money has collected in the corporate sector. For the laborers, all of the money they make is being saved up rather than spent and recirculated through the system because they, as the overwhelming majority, have the overwhelmingly least amount of money collectively. The corporate world begins to lose value because of the lack of spending on anything that it's absolutely essential, so there is huge competition for essential goods. The biggest variant that determines a buy is by far the price, especially in economic times such as this. So, the war begins on who can make the lowest quality essential goods that copycat the function that they serve.

So, here we are. Everything we own is from China and is made of thin plastic. Our primary foods are riddled with intense pesticides and wrapped in carcinogenic materials. Housing has been pseudo-monopolized. Drug corporations are more interested in suppressing symptoms than curing anything. And somehow still the only ones that are allowed not to pay taxes are the people responsible for the entire mess in the first place. We can't ask the corporate sector to even out what they siphoned from the public, that will surely "crash the market" and break their legal obligations to their stockholders.

I just don't see the point of them at all anymore. It's like having a pet dog that can only eat its own body parts; it's eating away at itself constantly... so why not just put it out of its misery? Why are these "mandatory" to our political subscription? They don't seem to work very well at all... why do we staple them to every inch of our lives, just so we can complain when they screw us? So we can dream of one day being atop one and having our faces plastered on Forbes while not having to watch the foreign workers literally die for it?

The whole situation is "out of control".... a statement which I take as nothing but a challenge to the power of the people. So what do you think? Should we reassess whether these are mandatory institutions? They certainly seem to create more problems than they solve for 98% of the population.

OP, you have a point.

Ultimately it is the work ethic/moral ethic of society that gets reflected in any business.

Corporations should work for the good of the society.

Hope it helps. Peace.