Quote (Plaguefear @ Apr 18 2018 04:51pm)
If you think less protections in place would make the elites more moral actors i have a bridge to sell you.
Even coca cola has had activists murdered in south america because they were slowing up progress there..
The corporations are non moral entities only beholden to shareholders, they already break any laws they can get away with now if the risk is less than the reward.
How is having no strong system in place to reign them in going to suddenly stop their greed?
Simple answer is human history has taught us that they will pillage anything and everything they can, enslave anyone they can and deliver the best possible share price.
Ask african blood diamond miners about the absence of a state, they love it.
either you are moving the goalposts, or i misunderstood " the people with the power and the wealth are already the most unscrupulous people " to be literal, when you actually meant corporations. a fine line i suppose.
but you're also comparing how corporations act in the developing world to how, hypothetically, they would act in the industrialized world if the government disappeared. thats apples and oranges. also apparent by your point, u say they want to deliver for share holders. ok fair enough, but things like the stock market and currency generally require a strict system of controls to work, usually done by a government. Your assumption that they would pillage the places and people that they are trying to help with stock prices seems to contradict yourself. without the government to hold up society economically corporations needs to fill the gap. By raping the population they destroy their customer base, employees, and themselves. it just doesnt make sense. you can claim corporations, if they ran the government, would still fuck people over all the time. newsflash, so does the government, all the time. so what you're really saying is "the new corporation govt would do bad things, like the old govt". to a libertarian. i mean, dont you have paint to watch dry?
Quote (GodSmiter @ Apr 18 2018 04:53pm)
He agreed gates can be a great philanthropist... He isn't being biased towards the elite when he points out exactly how gates got so rich to begin with.
i didnt say that's what makes him biased, im basing it off of years of posts on the subject. my overall point was that American philanthropy is actually quite good, which was a secondary point to counter the idea that financial elite are immoral. either way we can't really know unless we do it what corporations would do, but stability is unarguably better for business than chaos.
This post was edited by thesnipa on Apr 18 2018 05:00pm