Are you suggesting that the stock market and investors are carcinogens?

Yes, and they are killing the host.

And the legal environment is carcinogenic, too.

> Oftentimes, companies will have a legal obligation to their stockholders to (attempt to) maximise profit…

Can you point me to an example of a company that has a legal obligation "to (attempt to) maximise profit"?

I suspect that, in fact, the legal obligations of any company include (but are not limited to) increasing profit whilst taking into account many other factors.

Maximizing profit is a good thing.

Why? The only answer I see is that you make more money. But it is well understood that money doesn't lead to happiness.

What if your company was making enough money that you could pay everyone worked there generous salaries and your customers are happy. If you product is complete I don't see the need to add more. Why not let everyone work half time, and continue to deliver an excellent and focused product. Slowly adding features and integrations only as they make sense.

What we see instead by companies aiming to maximize profit is that they keep adding stuff that no one wants, hiring more people and squeezing every cent out of their customers. Sure, they make more money for a while but if you give me those two options I would much rather work half the hours and pay my employees more with happy customers.

In a perfectly competitive market, it leads to optimal allocation of resources - i.e. capital and human labour is used a way that is most beneficial to consumers.

The less competitive the market is, the less this is true But profit maximization = good should be the baseline.

I'm really confused that sometimes HN is full of libertarian comments but sometimes it suddenly turns to populist left. Mainstream economics is underrepresented on the internet despite it being most correct (imho obviously).

We could but at some point having 10x more people then you need working half a day a week doesn't seem optimal. Maybe it could work but it seems that there is some sort of workforce size that makes sense for a given amount of work.

I think that something like a universal basic income makes more sense here than to force a company to grow, possibly harming its product just to employ more people.

In the same way explosion is a good thing, if confined within and channeled by an internal combustion engine. Outside, usually not so much.

Not so much? The profit-driven economic progress over the last century is astonishing.

It is - that's because regulators managed to mostly keep the market smoothly running. Controlled combustion, not explosion and not choking the engine.

Sometimes, other times only if you ignore externalities

Assuming “profit” in the philosophical sense, yes. But human values are not Mammon.