I think one way to phrase this in a way that reflects how the market works is that sellers often very much under-value the worth of the brand itself, and buyers know this. If you can buy a brand for X and exploit the customers who trust that brand for 2*X, then it's worth it even if it destroys the brand that was truly worth 10*X in the process. The trouble comes when X is large enough to buy (almost) literally anyone out -- "F-You Money" -- and the seller don't care what the true value of the brand is because it's yacht time, baby. And the employees & customers get screwed.
If this is a problem we want to solve, the answer IMO is stuff like employee-ownership & unions.
I think that having corporate charter/bylaws include things like company long term health as a guiding principal over short term gains may do it. Along with explicit limitations on the money an executive can take in any given fiscal year.
> It's too abstracted from externalities - from slash and burn asset sweating, to environmental damage to abusive employment practices offshored or put at arms length through contractors
None of this is intrinsic to corporations, and all of it can be legislated away without changing what it means to be a "corporation". This is just thinly-veiled advocacy for communism.
Hard disagree - communism and under-regulated financialised free-market capitalism are not the only alternatives available. Numerous potential political and economic systems, and combinations of those systems have and will likely exist in the future. There's literally nothing inevitable about the particular mixture of state backed shareholder corporate structures that currently hold sway.
The international order as it stands today radically differ in substance and practice to the corporate, legal, tax and intellectual property laws of even a half century ago. Although of course the idea of a corporation dates back at least to the sixteenth century - when they were explicitly created as vehicles of colonization - East India Company, Virginia Company etc.
I'd go so far as to suggest we literally cannot continue as a functioning civilisation under the current international order. We likely agree on one point though, we're more likely to fail as a society than change it without violence.
If this is a problem we want to solve, the answer IMO is stuff like employee-ownership & unions.