A company, by definition, has a number of contributors, and while arguably the creator and innovator of a company deserves the lion’s share of the rewards, a question some have pondered is whether there should be some kind of limit or sunset on how long this should be allowed to go on? So long as descendants of the founders can manage the corporate empire, the empire could exist indefinitely, along with the stark and extreme apportionment of the profits to the owners and owners’ descendants. What is Creator’s perspective on this observation?

Here again you are focusing on the surface of things and not considering the deeper ramifications. Our perspective is that we see no problem with ownership of one’s efforts and what one can obtain with one’s own money. Someone who starts a business and puts in the tremendous effort required to make it successful rightly deserves the right to control what happens to the income and how it is distributed. Owning a business and passing it down to one’s heirs is in many respects no different than personal possessions because they are all acquired through personal initiative and wherewithal in the first place. So the idea someone could come in and simply take those things away from one’s heirs because a certain arbitrary length of time has passed is the imposition of power in an arbitrary way against the individual. The problem with such dynasties is a deeper one, that there is not an equitable arrangement at the outset such that there is not an appropriate ratio in sharing the profits. If you look at corporate dynasties, while the ownership might pass down within family members, the many, many workers who are supported in making their livelihoods include, in many cases, a quite large number of individuals through multiple generations having a livelihood that depended wholly on the success of that organization and its existence for them to have a way to make a living. So to say this is all an evil enterprise because it is owned by someone or their descendants ignores the fundamental truth that it is serving a much wider group of beneficiaries. This does not include as well the recipients of goods and services in exchange for a monetary compensation. Those who buy those things will be doing so because they are receiving a value of some kind in exchange. That is a true contribution to society that is not selfish but very much in keeping with divine principles of shared recognition in the merits of others and their contributions for the greater good of humanity. So the existence of long-standing organizations is, in many cases, well deserved and duly earned through the hard work of many who have been compensated along the way. In the modern era, you cannot command slaves to work for you for nothing, so the issues are somewhat less serious than in earlier times where people were forced to work for a pittance and often died along the way from inadequate nutrition, safe housing, and a low-quality existence with respect to hazards they could not avoid, of all kinds. There are more equitable ways to construct enterprises and this is where true competition comes in because it will begin to enforce more and more equality in having safe and comfortable work environments as well as the working conditions, the length of the workday, and pay levels. With competition, recruiting the best people is easiest when paying more than the competition, so there is a natural series of pressures that work to the advantage of the employee and constrain what the employer can get away with. The missing piece in all of the arguments of economics is that there is no consideration of the yearnings of the soul and the expression of soul characteristics in what people bring to the enterprise as individuals with inherent characteristics, makeup with regard to character, and their spiritual alignment with divine principles like wanting fairness and equality with an inclination to help one another and be motivated to work for the common good as much as for the self—those are divine attributes. So you can view the entire discussion of economic systems, their pros and cons, and likelihood of success and failure and relative merits all you like, but if it is done in a vacuum with regard to consideration of morality and spiritual alignment, you will be working in a vacuum and missing a large component of what needs to be present to make things whole and what is often a major influence when changes are made for the better, or conversely what happens to result in a diminishment, a decline, and a failure of an organization or a society as a whole. So the various economic systems, if only discussed with regard to the rights of individuals, how much money they will make, and the degree in which they have some personal say in the enterprise, at least in controlling their individual circumstances with respect to work rules and pay, there is a deeper set of issues and constraints and contributing factors that reflect the yearnings of the soul and the reaction to the absence of divinity. The absence of such considerations from discussions of economic systems creates a major blind spot in thinking. It allows people to embrace authoritarian regimes all too readily because they seem to serve the community in a fair fashion, but the fairness exists solely on paper without a consideration of the consequences to the soul if people must surrender their sovereignty and their liberty, in effect, becoming slaves to overseers whether a corporate boss or a government authority.