Comment by ryandrake

“The market” doesn’t stop business owners from slightly overpaying for labor or training people for the future or providing pensions. It’s the business owners who are choosing to do this. Say a business could make 8% margin by cutting corners and applying only short term thinking, but the same business could make 6% by not doing these things. The choice is up to the business owner. Nobody is forcing them to maximize short term profits. They’re not going to simply vanish just because they aren’t profiting as much as someone else.

The problem is that most business owners and shareholders are cut from the same cloth and only care about maximizing short term profits.