I didn't say they only cared about money, but that they stayed for their own reasons and not for the sake of the company. If they find the work at one place less demanding they might take that instead, but that is an individualistic reason as well.
You've made the rookie mistake of reducing the concept of self-interest to anything somebody does because they want to, and thus making egoism tautologically true.
You can convince people that radically different things are in their self-interest, from joining hands and singing Kumbaya to Genocide.
The notion of self-interest (or I guess in your case individualism, which is even shakier) is an empty vessel you can fill with nearly anything.
> You've made the rookie mistake of reducing the concept of self-interest to anything somebody does because they want to, and thus making egoism tautologically true.
No, that isn't the same thing. A collectivist would do things he hates and he doesn't believe in personally because the collective wants him to do it. He would sacrifice himself because the collective told him to. There are many examples of societies and organizations that worked that way, such societies are collective societies.
Military is the most common example, they are often run as a collectivist organization, most soldiers aren't there because they want to or they believe in the war, they are there because they support their country or they were forced to support their country against their will by authoritarian collectivism. And they wouldn't go and support their other country if they were paid more since they are there just to support their country, those are mercenaries.
Our capitalist societies aren't like that at all, we are so individualist that people like you don't even understand what it means to not be individualist. The closest to collectivism in USA wouldn't be corporations, but national anthems, school children saying the pledge, religion etc.
Maybe I'm not disagreeing with you at all, I'm just making the orthogonal point that individualism is very different than self-interest. I believe that other than basic human needs, most desires more complicated than that are in large part socially determined. Individualistic societies (as you describe them) inculcate individualistic desires into people and the health of a society is determined by how effectively it instills prosocial behaviors in its populace. American individualism is actually a collectivist enterprise!
So something like the stock market, as the engine of American capitalism, only works if everybody in your society believes that it is worth taking risks in order to possibly get a huge windfall. But is that really in people's self-interest? Maybe what one would interpret as some kind of natural individual desire is actually a particularly American level of risk tolerance that has been inculcated because it has led to a lot of collective success.
