Unfortunately, as is almost always the case, the almighty dollar skews ideals. Is it even technically possible for a public company to be "good" these days?
There's a story of a car company which calculate the cost needed to recall a defective model (safety-wise), versus the fines needed to pay times the possibility that the error may occur. There's cheaper on the later so they don't do the recall.
And the recent train derailments, many people said that if the fines are lower than the reduced cost they get for lowering the safety, they'll keep doing it again.
Neither the dollar as the object of transaction nor the system of accounting (accounting for resource allocation) called capitalism, have any real connection to the underlying drivers. The same problems existed in many other means of transacting (currency) and economic systems (communism notoriously being a sprint towards corruption).
Unfortunately, people have forgotten or have intentionally been misled from realizing the tacit type of self-regulating controls of a system like actual capitalism (you lose money when making bad decisions, you aren’t rewarded by thieving friends in government) and even aristocracy, where you had to maintain a certain balance of relationships even with the peasants in order to prevent being made a foot shorter.
Ironically, the rather tyrannical caste that has we emerged on Mt Davos is forgetting that sometimes the dumb and easily manipulated peasantry the technocrats see themselves as being benevolent demigod leaders of, don’t take so kindly to their shenanigans, with dire consequences for all.
I mean what are you, a bigot, racist, sexism homophobe for questioning the beneficent and glorious, exhaled rule of the Ruling Gods over your life and limitations on what you can do, say, and think? You better. Don’t get any ideas or your gods on Mt Davos will strike you down with ban hammers.
Capitalism provides a moral justification for the actions of greed, it makes responding to those incentives seem inevitable and necessary and so not the responsibility of the person actually doing it.
Neither of those is necessarily inherent to capitalism, I guess, but they are certainly part of the structure of the capitalism we live with so shouldn't be dismissed either.
You may be referring to the favorite alternative method for accounting under the inherently fraudulent system that fraudulently calls itself communism, while hating and having nothing at all to do with community, which allocates resources, i.e., means of production, by central committee that sees itself as some kind of contemporary gods on earth.
The means of production are a separate thing and are generally separate from gore they are accounted for and allocated for some purpose.
To simplify, you having the skill, told, and wood to create a bookshelf are the means of production; your method and decision making that lands you on making a bookshelf instead of book ends or something else, is where you could use capitalist or “communist” practices to determine that, Party of which is accounting for the resources and drawing a conclusion as to what to do.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/holders/
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders/
The only real solution is to give the employees of the corporation the degree of power when it comes to selecting the executive cohort as the shareholders of the corporation have - i.e. a 1 : 1 ratio. Germany does this to some extent.
The other option is more radical - eliminate the shareholder system of devolved liability entirely, and only allow the people who work within a corporation to own shares in that corporation. (Note that the traditional communist-socialist approach would be to simply replace the shareholders with a governmental central committee while keeping the structure essentially the same.)
Yes, there are many companies that do good things, and some that exist solely to do good things.
The difference is that they focus on doing those good things, so they don't show up in headlines very often.
Saying that Google or their employees are evil for doing the thing they're supposed to do is pointless. If they don't do <evil thing>, a competitor will do <evil thing>. The only way to save the world from <evil thing> is to make it illegal (and preferably with criminal penalties, not just small fines), so that corporations can avoid doing it without worrying about the competitive risks.
(although Google and all of big tech are evil monopolists and they need to be broken up)
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/on-lina-khan-derangement-...
This line of thinking bothers me more than it probably should. How can corporations be thought of as separate entities from the people it consists of, in any context except legal? I wrote a lot more, but decided to distill it into one question: How can they be, in good conscience, allowed to get a pass?
Consider the CEO of Google growing a conscience (hypothetically ofc). If he decides to cut back on <evil things> for the good of society, then society will benefit, but Google shareholders will lose. The impact will be measurable in financial statements, and when the board meets to vote on a new CEO, they’ll replace him with someone who will do a better job of making those numbers go up (aka someone without that conscience). The system self-corrects in the long run!
The CEO has a legal obligation to protect the interests of share holders (“fiduciary duty”). So from that perspective, a CEO acting in the interests of society rather than shareholders is breaking the law, and could be personally liable.
The incentives in the system are not set up in such a way that corporations could be reasonably expected to “self police” in a way that benefits society at the expense of shareholders. Sure, in some cases it’s possible to have a win-win scenario, where everyone benefits, but those are extremely rare.
IMO this is a good system because it leads to the primary producers to perform at peak efficiency, but it doesn’t work unless it’s balanced by government regulation, which is something that the government has been miserably failing at for the past two decades (at least)
> How can [corporations] be, in good conscience, allowed to get a pass?
I sort of expected you to answer that corporations don't get a pass. I agree with your premises:
1) corporations will follow their own incentives
2) legislation is the means for "caring for society"
3) legislation changes a company's incentives and should be enforced
It goes against the Zeitgeist simply because Americans understand that their representatives and senators are largely corrupt (regulatory capture) so enforcement and legislative remedies are a pipe-dream until we deal with legislative corruption.