These easy definitions always bother me. "The only purpose of corporations is to maximize shareholder profit." Really? The only purpose? Shareholder profit or value is a side effect of producing products or services that people want. The purpose of a corporation is to focus on what it does and do it well. Shareholders benefit from this activity.

Anyone who starts or runs a company and says "My only purpose is to increase shareholder profit" is probably going to fail to deliver.

The other one is this issue of "corporate greed" or this idea of outsourcing to lower cost manufacturing centers in order to make more money. As someone who has the scars to show for it, I can tell you that "greed" is never a part of it.

Imagine, if you will. That you are making widget A in the US or Europe. You are doing well. Everything is manufactured in house or locally. Profits are good.

Now, imagine that a competitor decides that they can beat you at your own game and make widget A for less money if they outsource their manufacturing to, say, China.

Their list price is now lower than yours by a bunch.
You don't want to loose market share, so you lower your list price. Only to discover that now your profits can't support your US-based operations. Just can't do it.

What are your choices? You can't automate your way out of the problem because you are already as efficient as you can be. You could leave the market altogether and move on. Lay off everyone in that division and lick your wounds.

Or, as it is more often the case than not, you can follow-suit and find your own manufacturing solution in China. Now you can lower your prices to match or improve upon your competitors's pricing and you've restored balance to the force.

Or so you thought. At this point nobody is making as much money as they used to. But, a race to the bottom ensues. Very soon Asian manufacturers enter the fray. Not only are they the beneficiaries of low-cost manufacturing, they also benefit from a far lower regulatory burden as well as not having to deal with progress-killing unionized labor and their ridiculous rules and costs.

The race to be bottom continues. Only that you and your local competitors are now at a serious disadvantage with respect to your Asian competitors.

What to do? Well, again, you could leave the segment, fire everyone and move on. Maybe you license IP and life is grand. Or, you could take it a step further and become a brand behind a product that you barely touch. Sure, you have to slim down the ranks but the business continues to exist in some form.

At no point in this slippery-slope is anyone thinking about getting rich. In fact, the effect can be quite the opposite. Profits become thin and the business suffers for it. You've taught your competitors how to make your products and have very little more than a brand to use as an advantage over them. You can't make anything any more and simply don't have the equipment, facilities, process, skill-set, network and people to even attempt to compete with anyone.

And life goes on.

To say that these corporations are "greedy" and that their "only purpose" is to provide shareholder value is, in my never-humble opinion, to be utterly ignorant of the day-to-day realities they have to face.

The reality of the situation is that, over the last 50 years, we have collectively opened Pandora's box. Consumers have voted with their buying power to overwhelmingly favor product that can only be manufactured in places like China due to cost structures. Given this, closing Pandora's box is as close to impossible as you can get.

MBA's and corporations cannot force consumers to behave altruistically and support locally made --higher cost-- product when they can drive over to Walmart and overdose on product at much lower price points and, yes, very good quality in most cases.

There's that scene the "Outsourced" movie that kind of encapsulates the whole phenomenon: A caller wants to buy a bald eagle statue but complains that it is made in China. The operator indicates that they have US-made versions and she'd be happy to sell him one. Only that the US-made version is over $200 when the Chinese version is $20. The caller goes with the Chinese version.

Attention Walmart shoppers: You reap what you sow.