Businesses are powerful tools for the common good and the fact they produce returns for investors is absolutely critical to their continued existence and long-term viability.
But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce positive externalities and they need to produce those externalities for more than just their owners.
It cannot be "either/or" and it's not immoral to pursue profits.
You can explicitly build the business to say "delivering shareholder value is not our highest goal, we must remember that we live in a society and upon a planet".
Their purpose is absolutely not "to produce positive externalities" (whatever that even means). What makes you say that? You can, and people do, run a business doing all sorts of heinous things
There's an old saying: The purpose of a system is what it does[1]. You can't (well, shouldn't) judge something by its intended purpose if what it ends up doing goes against it.
Human quality of life tends to be pretty shit without them though, and that is ignoring all of the competitively a necessity "choices" where not doing so is literally suicidal. Not adopting early agriculture and settling down leads to nomadic hunter gatherers being outnumbered and genocided by sedentary farmers sorts of necessity. Refusing to mine and pollute means bad things happen to you when you encounter metallic armed and armored foes.
Voting obviously works, you can vote away capitalism, some countries did that.
The only reason it "doesn't work" is that the countries that did vote away capitalism didn't fare very well, so other countries people are very reluctant to try that again. But they absolutely could if they wanted.
This is a dumb saying. And if you start to apply it to everything capitalism still seems pretty ok. For example: "The purpose of Communism is killing 20+ million people"[1]
I agree that when taken literally, it's a dumb thing to say: literally (i.e., the dictionary definition), the purpose of a system is the reason why it was built, not what it does. But it's a slogan, and slogans don't always make sense taken literally. The point of the slogan is to remind people of the (obvious, I hope) fact that, as I wrote:
> you can't (well, shouldn't) judge something by its intended purpose if what it ends up doing goes against it
If you check my Wikipedia link it shows that the original quote says more or less the same thing: "[this slogan] makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgement, or sheer ignorance of circumstances".
In other words, it doesn't matter what's the historical context of why corporations were created, what matters is what they do now. You can argue, like it was argued, that corporations as a whole currently are a net benefit. My point is that bringing up the historical context of their original purpose adds nothing to the discussion.
As to your other point, I completely agree that it would be useless to try to defend the Staling regime by pointing out what communism was intended to be. That's more or less the point I was trying to make.
That line is blatant projection on the part of central planners. Both in the sense of how they see the world and it must be planned rather than arising from interactions of independent parties and random vatiables and because it is casting their own flaws onto others.
I'm curious to know why you see it that way, as I don't interpret it like that at all.
Quite the opposite in fact: if anything it's a reaction to people who do try to understand a system by looking at its original plan: it says that you should disregard that and look at what the system actually does (which includes "interactions of independent parties and random variables", as you say).
In any case, that's how I meant it: it's a bit useless to dig up the original purpose of corporations in history books to talk about how corporations work today, like the comment I replied to suggested.
>But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce positive externalities and they need to produce those externalities for more than just their owners.
I see little evidence that this is true. If anything, modern VC companies are "externality parasites". They produce positive externalities for some (ie. shareholders), by putting a lot of negative externalities on society as a whole (see for example the cost to democracy, societal cohesion, etc. that comes for Facebook and the like).
It’s pretty rare for businesses to produce positive externalities. Businesses create value and some of that value goes to others, but that normally happens through explicit transactions.
Businesses are powerful tools for the common good and the fact they produce returns for investors is absolutely critical to their continued existence and long-term viability.
But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce positive externalities and they need to produce those externalities for more than just their owners.
It cannot be "either/or" and it's not immoral to pursue profits.