Topic: Corporate entities should have a forced maximum lifespan (Read 2278 times)

If you were to look at it this way then you could say that the owner of a business (shareholders) are the individual members of the species, and the actual business is the actual species. When the shareholders sell their stake (their shares) they "die" and a new shareholder is "born"

This is a good analogy. Any company that is not able to embrace chance based on the changing marketplace will eventually fail and it's assets will be taken over (purchased) by some stronger entity.

What the OP is advocating for is the stronger entities to be forced to be killed after x number of years and the assets be "donated" to the weaker companies. This would clearly be a great destruction of wealth and a bad idea

I agree, these monolopies rig the game.

Makes sense. We can see a company as a species. Although individual members of the species have rather short life spans the species in its totality can potentially live very old.

Exactly. The companies that are not able to meet the needs of their customers while keeping costs below revenues will eventually die off. Companies that are able to evolve and adapt to changing markets will prosper. It is Darwinism at it's finest.

Quite true, we don't have capitalism --- we have monopolism.

sauce: http://criminalbankingmonopoly.wordpress.com/

I agree, fuck all these monopolies man.

The natural lifespan of a business is in its ability to meet the consumer's desires for as long as those needs exist; Coca-Cola, for example, is still around because people are still buying Coca-Cola products.  Businesses are not like people, they don't die when they get old, they die when they stop being useful.

To forcibly end a business because it has been around for a while just creates a giant vacuum in which people will demand said business be reinstituted so they can continue buying the products they wanted.  There is no law which has ever curbed man's desire; you make anything illegal, man willingly becomes criminal to continue getting the item he desires.

The only thing such an action will accomplish is making a lot of people lose work and costing all related businesses a good deal of money to replace the lost business, e.g. replacing all soda machines in every restaurant and venue in regards to Coca-Cola.

If you have an issue with corporations, why not advocate their special governmental rights be removed?  A corporation, after all, can only exist through politics:



This would certainly even the playing field and, with much fairer competition, other businesses can now compete much harder than before and, if a once corporation cannot compete, it'll die on its own.  This way, we don't have that massive production gap between having a business and not having a business, and there won't be a sudden loss of jobs as per your idea.

So you took the bait, big deal. I won't remember your account name anyway in the future when your credibility as a righteous participant in a discussion might really matter. 

Perhaps you should of written in the title that this is in fact the masturbatory fantasy

I see corporate entities as an organism, they will all inevitably die if they do not change and evolve, because the enviroment they operate in changes. If the corporate entity survives half a century, it must have evolved several times through several business cycles. So, it is already a different organism, the old entity is in fact dead and consumed by the new entity.

maybe it's less bad for aliens to eat.

Yes, Apple As We Knew It sort of died, happy?

By the way, you will die too. And guess what, even if the bitcoins you hold during the moment of your death double their value YOU STILL DIE. So don't give me the numbers, you are clearly missing the point, whether on purpose or due to stupidity is another question. If you die you are no longer able to stand for your views. Can Jobs do that from his grave? No. If anything, he will just flip his side in his grave if the new company leaders fuck something up.

You clearly have missed the point here. I am not trying to propagate the system that I came up with. I don't even like it myself so why are you trying to debate me and portray me stupid? I am not your opponent, I agree with you but you seem to be so shallow minded that you think people never fantasize. You have to admit that playing the Devil's Advocate can turn out to be very useful sometimes because it makes people think from a new angle --- a more unorthodox angle. This is how innovation is born --- by thinking outside the box, by fantasizing.

AAPL capitalization when Jobs died (Oct 2011) was ~ $325B. AAPL capitalization today is over $600B. Yep, Apple sort of died. 
 

Actually have to point this out?

If a company, which relies on free and voluntary interactions between customers and company, has been around for 100 years it must be because the customers value the company because the company pleases them. Thus you are stating that you should destroy something which is pleasing the community to make way for something that isn't pleasing the community (because new business can not compete without resources it can not get without coercive redistribution)?

This is one of the least thought through argument I have ever seen, not even counting the avocation of the use of force to steal another's property!

To the guys calling me an idiot: you have fallen into the trap of seeing just what you want to see.

To others: nice discussion and I thank you for participation. Many interesting thoughts have been generated as a result of my original post and I am now convinced that while the idea suits well for science fiction stories it has no place in the capitalistic world.

I would also like to emphasize that what I brought up is actually already present in a form of CEO mortality. For example, Apple sort of died with Jobs.

This makes sense to me. If a company knows that it will be "killed" at a certain time, then what is to prevent it from making shill companies that would assume the assets of the newly killed company? The answer is nothing. The only thing that would result in this is investors being hurt and manipulated

Not possible to make a company give up all they have worked for.  What if the company owner passes the power over to the child or some executive?  Why should they suffer because the company is successful?  This is the exact opposite of a free market and would likely stop innovation in may ways.

So all the employees lose their jobs? Become homeless in the streets? All that has been built is broken to pieces for the enjoyment of those who had nothing to do with building it?

At first I thought your post was a joke, then I sadly realized that idiot redistributionists like you actually exist.