You can pirouette around the margins, trimming a few unruly branches here and there, but let’s not kid ourselves—any reform worthy of the name would have to confront the nature of the beast itself. And that, of course, is precisely why it will never happen. We like to comfort ourselves with the fantasy that a massive corporation and a mid-sized company still ruled by the person who actually owns it somehow belong to the same species. They do not. They may share a vague anatomical resemblance, but one is still a living creature with a heartbeat, and the other has long since handed its soul to the financial equivalent of a temple priesthood.
Because the moment a company “goes public,” it leaves the mortal world and ascends into a colder, thinner atmosphere. Private firms may suffer from the familiar maladies of professional management—vanity projects, incompetence disguised as strategy, the usual bureaucratic creep—but public corporations are born terminally infected. No exceptions. Once their veins are pumped full of other people’s money and they grow dependent on the quarterly sacrament of shareholder worship, they metastasize. They become organisms that cannot be governed in any human sense of the word. You don’t regulate such entities; you merely build slightly stronger fences and pray they chew on someone else first.
There is only one real leash: let them die when they earn their death. No “too big to fail,” no soft landings, no public safety net lovingly crocheted from taxpayer sinew. If they blow themselves up, so be it. Sweep the debris, mark the crater, and move on. Because once a company goes public, we should assume—calmly, soberly—that one day it will go nuclear. Not out of malice. Out of design. That’s just how the system is wired.
And yes, it is its own quiet form of collectivism. A strange corporate communism masquerading as capitalism, where public money is siphoned upward to sustain committee-run monstrosities that answer to no one in particular while claiming to serve everyone in theory. That’s what these management boards are: not captains of industry, not stewards of vision—just committees presiding over a machine that devours responsibility and spits out plausible deniability. And we’re still expected to clap.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/why-trump-is-targeting-proxy-advisers-1d40b215