That's an appeal to emotion though while a company can do a cost-benefit analysis. Also, if you pay for your children that means you signal that the kidnapping business model is viable and thus endanger more children. If the government keeps you at gunpoint from paying for your children then yes, in the worst case a bunch of children might die, but the business model would die with them.
And yes, paying the ransom signals that hostage-taking can be profitable, but not paying it signals that you value crime prevention over the lives of your children, which isn't necessarily a reputation or circumstance you want, especially when they'll very likely end up brutally murdered.
A company that decided principle-based crime deterrence was more important than granting customers access to any of their funds for 6 months would probably go out of business quickly. Also, try using that argument when talking to people who live in areas largely run by organized crime.
A company I worked at once had a meeting with such a firm, and it all sounded pretty reasonable to me. Obviously, one would hope the company has backups (which are stored in a place that can't itself become encrypted), but if they don't, sometimes the cost of paying the ransom is far, far lower than the cost of staying down. These middle-man firms have probably saved companies from enormous amounts of damage. Another commenter claimed these companies are often in cahoots with the ransomers, which maybe is sometimes true, but I highly doubt it in the case of the company we dealt with, or other US-based companies with physical locations that meet on-site.
Of course in an ideal world no one wants to reward criminals, but just to give an extreme example, if someone kidnapped one of your children and held them hostage, you'd probably pay anything to get them back, and that's not far off from the situation some ransomware-affected companies end up in.