The prime objective for a business is to make money. All the ethics, right/wrongs, etc are things that we expect from the people who run those businesses. But the business is there to make money.
It is up to the people in charge of making choices for society to make the right choices. It's not the responsibility of the business. They have every right to lobby for anything they want.
A business is a way for people to organize and collaborate and it does not absolve those people of their moral and ethical obligations. Individuals are expected to prioritize family, community, country, religion, etc. We need to stop giving people a free pass just because they hide behind articles of incorporation.
Hold the people who have made you promises and then failed to follow through responsible. Aka, your politicians. They are your backstop. What makes Goldman, GSK, Haliburton, or any of the other shady, scummy businesses out there responsible to you? They are responsible to the law on the books.
Our politicians are supposed to prevent business from screwing our society. Stop giving them an out. They failed, time and time again.
Stop expecting politicians to be perfect.
The state or the people grant that charter to the business, with the benefits its confers regarding liability and taxation, so we could decide to do so only if the business commits to the terms.
There's no inalienable right to incorporation in the US constitution - the corporation is a statutory fiction we've all agreed to use.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/26/pge-gets-maximum-sente...
They're not supposed to pass the fine to their customers in any way. I don't believe anything.
They have no right to lobby for anything they want. They may have the legal right to do so, but it's still wrong in some cases.
If Company A wanted to lobby for the killing of all blue eyes babies, they could. They can make signs, start campaigns, attempt to get a meeting with a member of Congress.
All of that lobbying would be useless though because we all know that that idea is disgusting and wrong (hopefully we all know... with this current climate, nothing is certain).
The act of killing the babies is wrong, and we can pretty much all agree on that. But that company has every right to lobby for that position. No matter how crazy.
> They may have the legal right to do so, but it's still wrong in some cases.
You seem to agree here.
But then afterwards you concentrate entirely on legality. If you just wanted to say that it's legal for businesses to lobby like this, I don't disagree, but I don't see how that position is described in the original comment, nor do I even understand the point of making that comment, since I think we all already know that it's legal.
If you did indeed mean to say that it's legally allowed but morally reprehensible, then we are indeed in agreement and I don't think there's much to say here.
No one is saying they don't have that legal right; they're saying that "legal" doesn't imply "ethical".
Consider Company A's lobbying efforts succeed and people start killing blue-eyed babies. Even if Company A never kills a baby, they still did something unethical, since there's a causal relationship between their lobbying efforts and a thing we just agreed was wrong.
That's a laughably arbitrary choice you're making.
We pay businesses for goods and services.
While you can "choose" a politician, you get whoever the group chose for 2-6 years. Don't like your president or their morals? Deal with it until the next round of choice.
I think that imbalance in individual authority and power gives everyone the right to hold public and private individuals to different standards.
Remember the time when there was a single phone out that combined flagship performance with a size that fits comfortably in one hand? Or the time when laptop manufacturers included PgUp/PgDown/Home/End keys instead of hiding all of those behind a Fn key? Or the time when I could use the internet without being tracked by every single competitor? Good luck avoiding Facebook or Google Docs when your charity has bought into those for communication?
The businesses everyone's fawning about are also the businesses who have best figured out protection from customer choice by employing lock-in and network effects. That's not choice, that's rule by moat.
Customer choice is for suckers. When a flood of ads and convenience can lure the masses, who would even pay attention to the few idiots who vote with their wallets or think of long-term market implications?
My wallet has no more effect on product availability than my vote has on the politician who represents me and what policies they support.
You try to exercise your consumer rights next time you're in a hospital, or something unforeseen occurs, or you're subject to a telecom monopoly, etc... etc...
Your way of thinking only works in a perfect fiction that has never and will never exist, except as a sop to some egos.
