Friday, November 25, 2011

Corporations will do anything for profit (as long as it's bad).

This post by Female Misogynist made me think: the liberal narrative likes to paint corporations as so driven by greed that they will do anything for profit, including (as in, for instance, the movie Avatar) killing large numberrs of sentient beings.

Yet whenever Congress is proposing some new business regulation, they always claim that the regulation makes "good business sense", requiring businesses to do only what they would be doing anyway if they acted in their own interests. Not to mention the complaints that corporations would be able to dominate the market with products that liberals claim they want, i.e. shampoo in non-sexist bottles.

Liberals seem to believe that corporations will only do bad things for money, but will happily ignore profit in favor of some racist/sexist/homophobic agenda.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hm. It seems that a lot of the Female Misogynist's posts have disappeared from her Wordpress blog. That was her backup, her main blog was on blogspot: http://malechauvinist.blogspot.com/

Too bad she seems to have stopped posting. I wonder what happened.

Robert said...

My problem with corporations is not that they attempt to make a profit, but that by design all they can do is attempt to make a profit. If you want something more than money, you have to find another way to organize your energies than the limited liability corporation.

Then you will have to protect that entity from the LLC, which will invariably try to find a way to quantify and monetarize what it consumes and produces.

Dr. Φ said...

Robert: You raise a point that I've seen made in the context of third world economic development.

If there will ever be a way forward for Africa (there's not, but hypothetically speaking), it will require economic development, not foreign "aid". But aid is easier. For-profit corporations labor under so many regulations. I'm not a business guy, but they have something to do with ensuring that the "business case" is solid. Like you said, corporations aren't allowed to undertake a venture with the expectation that it will benefit somebody else.

In contrast, legally, nobody cares whether a charitable organization is effective or not.