Is unethical behavior pushing companies to the top of the food chain?
Or is it that other companies feel more ethical simply because they don't have as many chances to engage in unethical behavior?
If it's the latter, all the push to split the companies is for nothing and we should just consider "ethics at scale" to be an unsolved problem I guess.
If you're up and coming, the best strategy is to just make a better product. You know whose at the top and you can adapt your product to where they are weak.
If you're at the top, i suspect the optimal strategy is to try and cut your competition off at the knees before its a threat.
I think we see this across many things. Just look at all the messed up things states do when they're super powers vs middle power states.
History proves you right.
The entire British empire, a fabulously wealthy system, was founded on slave trade (think: kidnapping, trafficking) and when that became too risky to maintain either the trade or profit margins, they moved over to global drug trade. The opium wars.
some are telling
This is besides the point you’re making, but I disagree with this. Disregarding the ones who make drugs for medical use, we already have recreational drug companies operating legally, namely those selling alcohol and tobacco (and coffee I guess). They are not the biggest corporations in the US (although some are still huge and powerful, of course).
The reason it’s currently so insanely profitable dealing in some of the other drugs is their prohibition, which makes prices skyrocket (and of course, when you’re already on the wrong side of the law, you might as well cut corners and utilize harmful practices to the extreme, even further increasing the profits).
Money is the most dangerous behaviour-altering drug.
It shouldn't be a surprise that a system which rewards sociopathy and discourages kindness and empathy keeps generating sociopathic behaviours.
There’s absolutely no requirement that a capitalist (either the same one that stands to profit or a different one) control the flow of information in order to profit, lots of (probably most) capital funds the production of highly competitive and price-transparent goods, and all public stock companies disclose their expenses publicly. Even Google and Facebook provide clear prices to their customers, the issue with surveillance companies in particular is that their users aren’t the customers, but that’s totally orthogonal to the conflict you’re describing.
I also don't think it's really relevant here, since Google and Facebook employees are about the least coerced labor there is, considering that virtually all of them could another job earning an order of magnitude more than the minimal living wage in their area at the drop of a hat.
It is.
It is also a feature, to a greater or lesser extent, of many systems that are downstream descendants of capitalism and haven’t replaced the elements that produce that feature.
It is also a feature of the upstream immediate predecessor of capitalism (feudalism, in which control of the means of production is unified with land ownership and typically executive, and often judicial and legislative, power over those on it) in an even starker form.
> even in a market socialist system
“even”? Market socialism is a very close relative and (conceptually) descendant of capitalism, not some distant and opposed system.
> in which labor receives all that it produces, any individual worker depends on their employer more heavily than their employer depends on them, so you still have an imbalance of power.
In market socialism, the employer is an agent of the employees, who (in many versions) each individually hold guaranteed rights with respect to it much the same as citizens of a liberal democratic regime do against the State. Both the universal elimination of the employer fundamentally serving an interest outside of its employees and also the common (but not universal, “market socialism” is a broad category with lots of variations) guarantees of individual rights to employees exist specifically to mitigate the adverse effects of the employer/employee power balance that it retains from capitalism.
How is this unfair?
My take on this is that in a small company, the individual with his morals and values can still have an impact on the behaviour of a company. Above a certain size, when the company is public, the individual has less impact on the company, and there is an emergent behaviour that is only driven by the incentive to "enhance shareholder value", and all moral values that the company could follow, and that come from individuals in the company, disappears.
A company's social role is to provide jobs and goods for the society to work well. But this is not aligned with the survival incentive of the company, to "enhance shareholder value", which becomes it's only role.