From the morality point of view, “Investing to Give” sounds to me much like “Winning a Lottery to Give”. The parallel does not lie in the inherent risks!
Imagine that the economic system would be set up so that all people in developing countries were required to enter a large fraction of their income into a lottery but only people from developed nations would be allowed to actually buy ballots. The winner keeps a third of this value for their own consumption, gives a third to the government of their country, gives a sixth to a philosophy club in their local town and only gives one sixth back to the community which created that value, meaning that five sixths of the value created by these people was taken from them without their consent.
Isn’t the usual mechanism of investing just that—giving the investor a right to extract part of the value created by the company employees, forever, with no limits regarding the return of their original investment?
From the morality point of view, “Investing to Give” sounds to me much like “Winning a Lottery to Give”. The parallel does not lie in the inherent risks!
Imagine that the economic system would be set up so that all people in developing countries were required to enter a large fraction of their income into a lottery but only people from developed nations would be allowed to actually buy ballots. The winner keeps a third of this value for their own consumption, gives a third to the government of their country, gives a sixth to a philosophy club in their local town and only gives one sixth back to the community which created that value, meaning that five sixths of the value created by these people was taken from them without their consent.
Isn’t the usual mechanism of investing just that—giving the investor a right to extract part of the value created by the company employees, forever, with no limits regarding the return of their original investment?