Well, fine. So maybe banning M&As is not the right way. But what is, then? Because the problem is real and severe, and it's also just another case of a more general problem - how to stop the market from creating a class of specialists gaming a single metric?
It's prevalent everywhere you look. As you say, M&As let small business owners retire or move away, without being prisoners of their own business. But the failure mode is companies being built with exit in mind, existing to be flipped - this is doing huge damage to the markets and peoples' lives right now.
Or take housing: it's nice that individuals have a way to sell their house and recover some of the money and effort put into it, when their kids leave the nest, or they retire, or they just want to move to some other location. But the failure mode of this is flipping - people and companies who buy properties, "improve" them to maximize resale value, whether the "improvements" make any sense or not for future tenants, and sell them to various actors. This creates a huge distortion on the real estate market, to the point that housing is now built for flipping, not for living.
(There's also a secondary and equally socially bad effect of owners opposing anything whatsoever that could lead to drop in (growth of) housing prices in their area.)
Or take finance: it's not hard to see the failure modes created by professional finance class, that's busy optimizing money flows in isolation from everything they relate to in the real world.
Or, take corporate management, and the rise of MBA class: specialists in running business as an abstract profit-generating machine, in complete isolation of what the business does and means in the real world.
Etc. etc.
This is the big problem I think we're facing: stopping over-optimization.
It's prevalent everywhere you look. As you say, M&As let small business owners retire or move away, without being prisoners of their own business. But the failure mode is companies being built with exit in mind, existing to be flipped - this is doing huge damage to the markets and peoples' lives right now.
Or take housing: it's nice that individuals have a way to sell their house and recover some of the money and effort put into it, when their kids leave the nest, or they retire, or they just want to move to some other location. But the failure mode of this is flipping - people and companies who buy properties, "improve" them to maximize resale value, whether the "improvements" make any sense or not for future tenants, and sell them to various actors. This creates a huge distortion on the real estate market, to the point that housing is now built for flipping, not for living.
(There's also a secondary and equally socially bad effect of owners opposing anything whatsoever that could lead to drop in (growth of) housing prices in their area.)
Or take finance: it's not hard to see the failure modes created by professional finance class, that's busy optimizing money flows in isolation from everything they relate to in the real world.
Or, take corporate management, and the rise of MBA class: specialists in running business as an abstract profit-generating machine, in complete isolation of what the business does and means in the real world.
Etc. etc.
This is the big problem I think we're facing: stopping over-optimization.