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This did use to happen. IN the 20's, companies could just print more shares and sell them, with no notification to anybody that they had diluted them. Until there were laws created to stop it.



"ah, the old lets play at being a stickler on vocabulary to divert attention from the point"[1]

Company shares are not money.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35846017


So on one hand some argues money is not currency, and then turn around and say shares aren't money, but they are currency. They can be sold for money? right? It seems like splitting hairs to obfuscate the point that humans will commit fraud and destroy the world in order to optimize to make money. Just throwing up technicalities that 'shares' aren't money isn't changing the fact that many companies have their one and only goal to increase share price, which can be converted to money.


> So on one hand some argues money is not currency

That's not my argument, and also irrelevant to this post.

> say shares aren't money, but they are currency

They're definitely not currency, either.

> They can be sold for money?

That's an asset, not a currency. Those are two very different things.

> It seems like splitting hairs to obfuscate the point that humans will commit fraud and destroy the world in order to optimize to make money.

You were claiming that "companies used to print their own shares = print their own money" in support of your argument "humans will commit fraud and destroy the world in order to optimize to make money". That claim is false, so it doesn't support your argument, and your "point" is not a point because you've provided zero evidence for it.

> isn't changing the fact that many companies have their one and only goal to increase share price

What fact? What number of companies can you point to that factually have their "one and only goal to increase share price"?

I can say for sure that I've never seen a company that doesn't at least have two goals, and your statement is completely irrelevant for privately traded companies.

You seem pretty determined to push your worldview that "companies are evil" without much thought as to what that even means, or producing blatantly false claims like "we as a society have chosen that the goal of Money is actually the most important thing to us" (if you think that, you need to spend more time with real people and less on the internet, because the vast majority of real people do not believe this).

Go read the Gulag Archipelago and tell me how a system without companies or "capitalism" works.


It used to happen with actual currency, too, before the government took and enforced a monopoly on printing it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking


That would be fraud to investors, given investors own the company in a shared manner. If some investor approve printing new shares all investors should be notified. But there are no laws settings how many shares a company can print.


Yeah, this used to happen before there were laws. Laws are needed or humans will commit fraud.




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