Sustainability In Business

Artificially raised prices, anti-consumer policies like planned obsolescence, the underpayment of employees, and the uncaring devastation of the environment are not necessary components of business.  A business can avoid each and every one of these things.  They are likely to be encouraged and practiced, though, if the goal of whoever is in power over a company is to simply continue to earn more money and expand the client base.  When people talk of corporate sustainability, they might strictly be referring to preserving or bettering the environment, but for a company and its business dealings to be sustainable, they cannot stand on perpetual increases of all things pertaining to profit.

Someone who cares only about greed, emotionalistic ecstasy, or short-term gain might genuinely never realize, despite their worldview and lifestyle being literally aimed at the goal of limitless expansion, that it is logically impossible to always have more money to siphon away.  Mathematical units go on without end, but there can only be a limited, if fluctuating, amount of people or of any physical resource such as wood or money.  This goal is not about truth or human potential, as some adherents to America's or India's style of capitalism pretend.  It is about accepting what is by necessity false and the folly of forgoing moral concerns for personal happiness (this kind of business leader would be especially in need of realizing that gaining the whole world while forfeiting uprightness of the soul is invalid).

Aside from moral aspects of this and the fact that it could be merely assumed to be valid because it is appealing to some, the objective itself is intrinsically contrary to reason.  No matter how many billions of people there would be on Earth all at once time, all of the contingent factors contributing to corporate success are inescapably finite.  There is finite money to be spent or saved, there are finite materials to make products, and there is finite time in which to buy or sell.  A finite number of people to either make purchases or do the selling is present at any given time.  The ego of a deluded executive or investor (and no, to be an executive is not to be stupid or evil by default), the allure of more wealth, and the grandness of evolving business schemes will not remove this shifting but inevitable prohibitor of endless growth.

An irrational kind of sustainability is what some business leaders want.  In its name, they sacrifice environmental sustainability (by mismanaging or needlessly using natural resources) and the sustainability of their customer base (by not paying workers enough to routinely buy things they do not need).  What would they even do with all the physical wealth in the world if there was no functioning economy to interact with?  Hoard it to feel secure about themselves?  No only is the goal of infinitely increasing revenue and success a logical impossibility, but it is also pragmatically futile if they would have nothing to do with their wealth once they amassed either the whole of global wealth or whatever arbitrary amount of money and items satisfies them.