You act as though business is this totally seperate thing to life. Business is some fancy legal words wrapped around the activities of groups of people. Saying businesses are only driven by profit is not fundamentally different from saying "employees and shareholders of Apple are greedy people who put personal gain over the moral principles of our society"

It's a practical point of view, not theory of society. It's great when companies put morals over profits, but they generally don't - companies don't gain much from being good and don't lose much from being evil; the impact is not big enough to offset the importance of being effective on the market. Companies that fail to be effective get outcompeted and die.

In the shorter term they are likely to face pressure from investors if they're doing something like taking a stand that shuts them out of a huge market like China.

Organizational dynamics frequently lead to organizations behaving in a way that their members probably would not conduct themselves in their personal lives.

Hypocracy is a bikeshedding dimension. China and the US both serve the politically-connected first and the people last; China does it by force and the US does it by manufacturing consent. Regardless of political system, the people must rise up and demand a fair government and insist on sensible regulations and justice with eternal vigilance. Power never cedes anything without a fight.

I think it's getting carried away to say there's no different. The US isn't quite what we'd like it to be, but you will not be kidnapped and charged with a trumped up crime for running a book store that sells books critical of the United States government. Noam Chomsky remains a free man.

Companies only care for profit inasmuch we allow them to do so.

A couple laws would deal with the problem quite rapidly but we first need to get this social-darwinistic neoliberal ideology out of our collective arses...

What are the proposed "couple laws" that could help here?

I fail to imagine how laws can convince a profit-maximizing entity to stop behaving like profit-maximizing entity.

Well, just off the top of my head - IANAL not an economist - but it would suffice to change by law the set of stakeholders that have a legal say on the company and you’re done.

Yeah! For example, the government could become a stakeholder in all companies to ensure that the populace's interest is taken into account in addition to profit... wait a second, that's what China's doing

> jpetso: Yeah! For example, the government could become a stakeholder in all companies to ensure that the populace's interest is taken into account in addition to profit... wait a second, that's what China's doing

What kind of stupidity is this? The Chinese government is an authoritarian oligarchy and doesn't give two shits about "ensuring the populace's interest." It cares about maintaining its power and control.

I think you need to cleanse yourself of your free-market straw men. It's not a bad idea for there to be more stakeholders in control of companies than just the shareholders. For instance, you could split the board between shareholders, employees, and customer representatives. That's not a radical idea either. IIRC, German unions have long had seats on their employer's board of directors, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

Yeah, why not... corporate has a powerful influence in the Government's decisions about the populace's interests, I don't see why not formally establish reciprocity.

Besides, in Germany Unions such as IG Metal _do_ sit on the Board.

I don't know how practical that is as a solution to social ills, but whether China is doing it or not doesn't really make it good or bad.

Yes, that's true. What I wanted to point out is that a good idea in theory can quickly turn into an instrument that's being used for other purposes.

China is a great example to be studied in this regard. Their changes do indeed ensure that profit will only be one of several considerations for company policies in China; this will undoubtedly result in more consumer-friendly corporate behavior, but it also tightens central control and is likely to deepen the kind of censorship measures that I personally would not want to wish on any person or company.

Letting all people (of a given country) have a say means involving the government in which the company's headquarters are located. I'd rather not have national[istic] interests working from within companies, I feel laws and regulations are better suited to get a fair & transparent outcome.

The German model that the sibling comment brought up is quite sane in comparison. It limits the stakeholders to only those who actively participate in production, which provides a kind of decentralization enforced by laws, but not directly steered by central interests. In terms of overall benefit to society, it's hard to argue against that model and it has served the Germans well. (However, it's also worth noting that having unions sit on the board doesn't prevent the company from making unfavorable decisions outside of the limited national and workplace-environment-related interest of the extra stakeholders, and often those changes can only be deferred / slowed down but not outright avoided.)

I am not sure. I think the problem there is that the Chinese government is actively involved in enterprises, like censorship, that most of us would agree the government shouldn't be doing. I don't think it's anything inherent to the idea of fully or partially state-run enterprises (especially when you consider how many services have been degraded upon being privatized).