It's reasonable to assume all entities act out of rational self-interest.
To be angry with someone when they simply defend their own interests is to either hate the person/entity or to be angry with nature itself. That was my only point.
To be angry with someone when they simply defend their own interests is to either hate the person/entity or to be angry with nature itself. That was my only point.
For instance, someone is legally permitted to call me an asshole. They may choose to do so completely in self-interest. I am then permitted to ask my friends to shun him and they may. I may use this implicit threat to ensure no one calls me names. I am not required to change the law to prevent being called an asshole in order to reconfigure the incentives.
In the same way, I may determine it to be in my self-interest to have a large company pay my government extra taxes, even in an ex post facto manner (though the constitution bans laws, it does not ban agreements that clearly are mechanisms to bypass that prohibition). I may then bring other weapons to bear to get things to happen. The most common such technique is by directing public opinion in a certain manner.
If someone were to tell me that the company dumping, entirely legally, in the waterway is just acting in self-interest, that’s irrelevant. I still don’t want the waterway dumped in so I’ll tell everyone anyway and we’ll kick up a fuss and make life hard for them, even though they are acting legally and rationally in their interest.
Can't blame me right?