the anti-corporate corporation

I've been thinking about business for a while, from a number of different angles, and I've recently started wondering whether maybe the primary model that exists, where the business is always looking to increase its profits, and where employees always want more money, might be challenge-able. What if, instead, you told people that working for your company would give them a maximum income of $50K (adjusted annually for inflation, of course)... this might be a way, for instance, for Fair or Direct Trade companies to increase the amount of money going into the actual farmers' and producers' pockets... If we take the example of coffee (just saw Black Gold, so this has spurred this thought process even further), if we're currently paying $0.23 a kilo, and selling for $10 a kilo, we might be making a profit of say $5 a kilo. Well, what if we reduced that by half? We could suddenly afford to pay the farmers a ton more, and we'd still feasibly have a very comfortable standard of living.

Again, as I say, I'm totally not a business-type at all, so I may be way off here, but couldn't someone start up a company which had as its central tenet not capital gain and profit but sustainability and edification? I just think, what exactly is the use of having $30 billion dollars to your name? To what end are the corporate fatcats trying to increase their margins? In the end, it all comes down to people wanting more stuff... but I think, isn't there a limit to how much stuff one can have? Bill Gates seems to think so, right? At some point, profit must become so much surplus that it's useless, no? So instead, what if you told everyone who wanted to invest and be on your board that they would receive a limited amount of money, and that if the company's profits did indeed rise, that money would be either be disrtibuted evenly across all levels, or indeed bve given away to some other philanthropic venture?

Or am I missing something? I just don't understand the value of wealth and profit, I guess, past a certain point. For comfort and even for leisure, perhaps, but after that...? It would just mean that a company had a higher purpose beyond the immediate cash benefit of its investors, and that it could thereby operate on much more wise and ethical principles. It would be a company with integrity, whose employees had a sense of purpose and a sense of their place in the world and as part of the Human Race.

If anyone out there knows business and has a grasp on these things, I would certainly appreciate some enlightenment...