If you listen to any politician, the reason we have businesses is to provide good, stable, well paying jobs for the voters.
Absolute nonsense. A business exists for one reason and one reason alone. It exists to add value to the world. A business takes value out of the world. It uses real estate, spending on rent. It consumes people’s time, paying for labor, and creative and administrative services. It uses up energy. It uses or borrows capital (money). Then, if it is an ongoing concern, it adds value to the world. It places a product or service on sale for the voluntary purchase by anyone. Each purchase is a provisional addition to the value the business is adding, until the magic day that the incoming revenue from purchases exceeds the outgoing revenue and the business shows a profit. At that moment the business has added value to the world. Its customers who could have purchased everything it purchased at the same price it paid, or anything else with their money that they desired more, were willing to pay for what it produced more than its costs of producing it. A total net gain of value.
Businesses exist to make us all richer, to offer us more ways to satisfy our needs and wants, to promote innovation (because it requires effort and creativity to produce a profit), and to make the dollars we earn so valuable that countless people think day and night about how to convince us to part with a fraction of one of them. And we are never required to do so unless we are sure what we get is more valuable than the dollars we give up.
Another way of looking at it is, businesses exist to meet people’s needs and wants. There is no revenue if you do not meet people’s needs and wants. Under capitalism, the buyer is king; the producer is a poor naive bowing and scraping. Just look at how powerful companies bow and scrape in America for customers.
Now you may want businesses to provide “good jobs”. What that translates into is you want someone else to identify a need or desire of other people, to devise a thing or service that meets it, to risk capital, effort, and time in setting up an enterprise, to manage expenses so that the good or service produced is something people will buy, to pay the taxes, take responsibility for regulations and laws, etc.
You are not entitled to any of that. If you want to earn money that allows you to buy things you need and want, you need to somehow give value to other people so they will give you their money. A job is simply a way to join someone else’s team in that project. As Peter Shiff says, nobody wants a job, everyone wants money. A job is a avenue to money, but the way to get money from others voluntarily is to do something for them. Do it yourself or join a team but the essence of the project is serve others so that others will serve you.
In the former Soviet Union, businesses existed to provide jobs. There, they used to say “we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” Because the businesses had no concern about the customer, after you were paid your money would have little power. In America, when you get your pay in your wallet, countless people court and flatter you.
In Latin American socialist countries, businesses exist to provide jobs. The Mexican state owned oil monopoly was used to give high paying jobs to friends of the elite, and lesser jobs to the public to quell unrest and poverty. The state run oil companies are poorly run (as you would expect) and the state is appropriating the value of the natural resource wealth and dissipating it. If Mexico simply sold the rights to drill oil, the state would get great revenue and private enterprise would manage it for a profit, a net value gain to the world.