You seem to skip straight to the end without realizing these companies did not even exist a few decades ago. They grew to their size because they provide value.
I've already said previously that companies tend toward monopolies and that's when problems begin, but that's on govt antitrust to handle properly. Whether it does is another issue, but it doesn't erase the fact that people have gone from 0 to B by creating companies from nothing and making a large impact of society.
The government is the people. Just like corporations at that size are far more than a single person. To reiterate for the 3rd time, all things eventually become too big and need to be managed, but that has nothing to do with value creation leading to wealth generation. I've yet to see a comment on how that's invalid beyond emotional complaints.
>> How does the adage go? "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
And there we go. Not sure how that's rational or productive. I guess you'll be first to tell every startup that exits successfully that they're now criminals for what they've done.
> but it doesn't erase the fact that people have gone from 0 to B by creating companies from nothing and making a large impact of society.
That doesn't invalidate anything I said and it doesn't support what you were saying very well at all.
Hitmen, heroin dealers and elephant poachers provide value to some people as well, but to say we should encourage those things simply because they provided 'value' is sociopathic.
Those things you mentioned are illegal. Nobody is saying you should do illegal things. But wealth generation is tied to value creation, and your stance seems to be that all wealth generation is from criminal means when that's clearly not true in the slightest. What else is there to say here?
You're just struggling to comprehend what I'm saying because in your free-market fundamentalist world view, companies are benign entities of wealth creation and nothing more.
I believe many of the things these companies do should be illegal. Many of them already are, they are just not fined/punished appropriately for them. It just becomes absorbed as a cost of doing business.
Lot of what Google, Amazon, Facebook Uber, Microsoft, Intel etc. have done to stay on top has been illegal but the fines pathetic. Other stuff should have bene illegal and people are slowly coming round to the fact. They all even colluded on keeping wages low, remember?
Of course you can expand out beyond tech as well. Enron fraud, HSBC drug-money laundering, DeBeers atificially limiting the supply of diamonds, Nestle claiming water is not a human right and fucking over Africans with their milk formula. I could honestly sit here all day and reel off instances legal violation after ethical violation after outright greed and exploitation from companies all over the world.
But it's too late now. Even making these things illegal now doesn't strip the companies of the wealth they accrued beforehand. They are entrenched, because the system encourages this with pitiful consequences.
I'm not naive enough to belive legal == moral and illegal == immoral. A lot of laws are lobbied by the entrenched to cement their own positions.
I've already said previously that companies tend toward monopolies and that's when problems begin, but that's on govt antitrust to handle properly. Whether it does is another issue, but it doesn't erase the fact that people have gone from 0 to B by creating companies from nothing and making a large impact of society.