Businesses have financial privacy, but some of them implode too. I think lies are what will eventually destroy any institution. So either way, Mormonism is toast.
Look at the old Reorganized church. Still kicking. The smarter ones eventually leave a mass movement when they discover its fraudulent practices or mendacity. Jiro Numano wrote about this phenomenon in Japan in Dialogue vol 39 no 4.
Eric Hoffer described in his The True Believer how a person enmeshed in a mass movement can be converted to a similar ideology (Communist vs Nazi), but can never be persuaded to just leave.
“Whenever we find a dispensation enduring beyond its span of competence, there is either an entire absence of an educated class or an intimate alliance between those in power and the men of words. Where all learned men are clergymen, the church is unassailable. Where all learned men are bureaucrats or where education gives a man an acknowledged superior status, the prevailing order is likely to be free from movements of protest.” P134
People join mass movements either because they don't like who they are, or seek to become what they are not, but in essence are escaping themselves. Religion is a substitute for what people really want, but don't want to pay the price to obtain it from their own travails.
Any claim that starts with "the one thing that..." is pretty much guaranteed to be wrong. Lack of transparency is one way of many, though it is one of the more effective ways to fail.
Besides a lack of transparency, is the lack of business.
If you lose customers, you lose the profit that drives the enterprise.
When a church or corporation reaches its zenith, and goes into decline because it no longer meets a viable need in the marketplace, it gets replaced by something else that does.
Mormonism has reached its zenith, and is in decline. It's hubris has helped contribute to its decline, as in total arrogance of its false superiority to all other religions and sub-cultures.
It's seen better days. What's happening with the exodus out from its ranks is a form of evolution of the species. We're moving up, not out. :)
What's left is a shell of its former "glory" days. The mask is off now; its former glory is become a relic of the past.
One of several lists of the top 10 leading causes of business failure...
Not Seeking Professional Advice Lack of Good Customer Care Copying Others Lack of Experience Unaccountability Lack of Personal Growth Poor Location Lack of Focus Wrong Expectation Quitting Too Soon
I didn't see "lack of financial transparency" on any lists.
You might be confusing lack of transparency with corrupt practices. Its the what they're doing that causes the failure, not the hiding of it.
money, where there is money someone is going to find a way to capitalize off the situation and take the gullible to the cleaners, it's human nature. 1) look at the government (rife with bureaucracies with the irs threatening everyone all the time) 2) look at what's happened to Mo town, Car manufacturing in bankruptcy, yet CEO's refusing a pay cut. 3) Look at Benny Hinn and how he profiteers off the christian donations. 4)Joel Ostien is suppose to make 40 million a year. I'm just waiting to hear another scandal surface.