No Stupid Questions

Companies grow and shrink from a combination of market and internal forces. Companies sometimes need to shrink or grow. The economy and culture are constantly changing. That is why it is very hard to predict where things will go.

Your example of having a company with a set amount of employees that produce a set product happens pretty frequently. A lot of employee owned or family businesses are this way.

I think most of your post can be summed up with why do investors want more and more money. The answer is because they can. If your company owes money to investors then they will beholden to them in one form or another.

There is another worthy discussion here and it is about boards. Boards that do not contain equal representation for the employees and the public can be very destructive.

Most of the corporate abuses we have suffered come from having perverse leadership non-representative of these two most important influences.

Profits about all. The size of the company itself, eh. But, profits must grow infinitely apparently.

Shareholder primacy. Thank you Dodge v Ford. Thank you Friedman Doctrine.

Because we decided to play this fucking game. Not growing is stagnation, which is wrong of course.

So we keep on hoarding more money for smaller groups.

I guess it's mostly because companies that don't try to grow are eventually pushed into irrelevance by companies that do. So most companies you hear about are growth oriented.

In some sense it can be good for consumers. If you have a nice idea for consumers, it's good that you are able to reach more of them or become more efficient in doing so.

Also, to start a business you need money. You can get money from investors, but they expect either interests on the loan, or that you grow so that their share is worth more. The latter is attractive, because you don't have to pay interests that can weigh your company down. But then the value of your company is almost defined by it's potential for growth. If you then decide not to grow anymore, this will tank the value of the company, and you might be stuck with a huge pile of stinking debt.

It's perfectly possible to have a company that is not growing and just stays where it's at. But then the salaries of the employees won't be growing either, and often that will lead to the best employees leaving. Which in turn will turn the non-growing into shrinking.

Perhaps you've seen a stagnant company and perhaps you have seen a growing company. The one feels like a cemetery while the other feels like a student party. Either can be good or bad depending on what kind of vibe you enjoy.

Note that this is not a feature of capitalism exclusively. Pretty much all systems thrive on growth, it's more like a law of nature, not something humans created.

Also, capitalism reacts pretty well to downturns: companies shrink or even die completely if they're not needed anymore. One of the major reasons Capitalism should work better than all the alternatives is that creative destruction. Problem is that governments are afraid of that destruction and usually try to prevent it from happening. I think a better way would be to let companies (including those "too-big-to-die" ones like large banks) die when it's their time to die, and rather protect the invidiuals from the effects. The longer you support things that should just die the harder the fall will be.

As a co-owner to a business, we grow because sometimes the funds from what we're already selling slow so we branch out in other directions to cover it. An answer for small businesses at least.

• Start business. Business very small, want business big. Big business happier than small business.
• Need money to big business, small business not enough money.
• Ask another big business for help small business
• Big business tells small business: We give you money, you get big, you owe us money back.
• small business always trying to be big business

Depends, but to meet demand seems reasonable?
Imagine you invent something splendid and life-changing. You have your company with a 100 employees but you can't satisfy the market so you expand.
Like with the safety match.

Ape brain often goes "big = good" and therefore "bigger = better". And since a bunch of other peoples ape brains have thought this before you, then now if you have a tiny business, it's very likely that your only options are to either get trampled by giants or try and become one of them, even if your ape brain doesn't think that way.

Only workers are expected to be happy with good enough. The elite will never say the balance of thier bank account is good enough. And thus companies always need to grow bigger.

It’s all based around fractional reserve lending and interest. Banks take in deposits and lend several times the deposit amount at interest against that reserve. To pay back the bank the business sector has to grow in order to pay interest on the principal. Make sense?

They can. But that would make you 'lose' capitalism.

Why settle for one yatch, when you could have several mega yatchs?

I'd highly recommend watching this video, it goes through the history of capitalism and why it is the way it is now

https://youtu.be/gqtrNXdlraM

Growth is needed so that Capitalists can make a living.

Without growths, owning companies would only pay dividents which would result in much less income.