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In Reply to: Well posted by PabloP on March 30, 2007 at 17:34:30:
I like your textbook, political corporate-speak response, but the truth in real time follows a different path once we get beyond "make as much money as possible." A lot of what you itemize is public relations dressing, a penny spent for a dollar made.Heard of the Exxon Valdez? There's corporate responsibility at it's finest. Corporate profit without social conscience. And it was like that because they could make it that way. Who do you think worked so hard on the lobby front to relax environmental and public safety protections in the first place? And following their failure, worked so hard to weasel out of their liability? For who, the community? Follow laws you say? Who do you think engineered those laws? If you think for a second that corporations and industries are good citizens by choice, or that they aren't working tirelessly to relax oversight of their greed, then ... well ... I know you're not that naive.
Corporations wouldn't have to so self-conscious of their images if they weren't always playing in the dirt. Maybe it was Churchill who said capitalism may suck, but it's a damn sight better than the alternative. Capitalism isn't all bad, but this is the dark side that we deal with. Denying it doesn't make things better.
Follow Ups:
Capitalism's "dark side" to that of virtually and other economic system - as bad as it may be in some instances.IMV, the single most important word in the English language is incentive. It's wwwwhat makes things work - all things.
"Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to" Mark Twain
Some of them are run in just the manner you suggest. Some aren't. But I didn't say they were good citizens by choice. I said that if they do good stuff, it isn't socialism as the quote from Friedman suggested, but simply an investment in their continued profitability.
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"Occasionally we list eccentrically, all sense of balance gone."
I think Milton Friedman's point was that the goals of capitalism are maximizing return on investment and that any moral or altruistic component is adventitious to capitalism. Capitalism may create the means to do charitable acts but charity is not an inherent component of capitalism. I think Friedman would argue that corporations are by nature amoral but I'll link to his full text so you can draw your own conclusions.
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