Excerpts: “The birth of the stock exchange had changed the nature of corporations. Rather than devoting themselves to the honor and prosperity of the nation, corporations had transformed into backroom gambling houses, venues for the skilled and the conniving to enrich themselves off the ignorant and the naive. And there were no casino managers to ensure the game was played fairly” (p. 90).

“But the breaking up of Standard Oil was also a moment of genesis. By 1911, Standards Oil was an enormous company; even broken up, its pieces would be giants by any normal standards. The Supreme Court ordered that it be broken up into thirty-four separate, independent companies but paid little attention to evening up the actual size of the new entities. Standard Oil of New Jersey, the largest of the pieces, retained almost half of Standard Oil’s total value–it would become Exxon. But the other pieces were large too. Standard Oil of New york, the next largest, had 9 percent of Standard Oil’s value and would become Mobil. Standard Oil of California became Chevron. Standard Oil of Ohio became the American branch of British Petroleum. Continental Oil became Conoco” (p. 194).

“False news on Twitter, for example, was found to be 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true news. Facebook researchers found that a sizeable majority of people joining extremist groups on the site were doing so because of Facebook’s own recommendation tools” (p. 289).

“Much like the ancient Roman corporations had done during the first century BC, Facebook had ignored, dismissed, or simply not known how its behavior affected the common good. It had prioritized its own interests over those of society and, in the process, undermined democracy more broadly. Only time will tell whether our democratic institutions can recover” (p. 294).

“But just because corporations were created to protect the interests of society does not mean that they will, in fact, end up doing so. History is littered with examples of them failing spectacularly in this respect. The corporations that were supposed to be collecting taxes for the Roman Republic ended up enslaving subject populations and corrupting the Senate. The Medici Bank usurped political power from the guilds and used the bank’s assets to fund the personal ambitions of Medici family members. The East India Company entangled the English Crown in disputes across the globe, from India to Boston. And after the Civil War, the Union Pacific defrauded the American government and raised railroad rates on poor farmers” (p. 298).

“There is roguery, here, to be sure, but there is also something mystical. The corporation is, at its heart, a testament to the power of cooperation, of people working together toward a common goal. Corporations work economic miracles because people can accomplish more together than they can apart. This is a cause for celebration and optimism, both about human nature and about our capitalist system” (p. 299).

“But when they use the corporation as a means of shaping public opinion and setting goals, they fundamentally distort its nature, turning it from an instrument to promote the common good into one that defines the common good in the first place. This is not the spirit of capitalism. It is a rigged game, and one that we should refuse to play” (p. 300).

“Pursuing profit as an end in itself, and not as a means to something greater, is simply greed” (p.  301).

“Corporations were created to pursue national goals, which, to be sure, included expanding commerce, but also included explorations, colonization, and religious aims. If you told a member of Parliament in seventeenth-century England that, as Milton Friedman said in 1970, the purpose of a corporation was to ‘make as much money as possible,’ he would have been shocked. Everyone knew that joint stock companies were intimately connected with the national interest–the monarch granted them charters for a reason, and it wasn’t simply to enrich the few dozen merchants on Philpot Lane” (p. 302).

“Democracy and capitalism must be allies, not antagonists. They should work hand in hand to ensure that corporations are institutions for the common good, as has always been the intention behind them” (p. 323).

Magnuson, William. (2022). For Profit: A History of Corporations. New York: Basic Books.