Politics is the the practice of how to organize society. There's no such thing as an apolitical entity. At the most basic level, just the fact that corporations exist is itself a political decision.

Sure, with a sufficiently expansive definition of political everything is, but in the comment above, "politics" meant "dealing with the preferences of." So the local Republican politician would want stuff if you wanted to build your chemical plant, maybe a new baseball field, maybe campaign contributions. Your Democrat-aligned hosting provider would want you to not run the center of operations of their enemies. You are using politics in the academic sense, where two kids playing tag are engaging in politics, but that is not the only thing that "politics" can be used to describe. Companies should follow the law, not politics.

Companies should do what their owners want per capitalism. If that's politics, the company should do politics.

Sure, but the political system should not be such that the owners of the companies have anything to gain by wanting their companies to do politics.

The only way that could ever be the case is if taxes ceased to exist. Until that point, there will always be lobbying for lower taxes.

Your objection really seems to be engagement in culture wars.

Companies have to obey laws and laws are written by politicians. Unless you think companies should be above the law they cannot, and should not be expected to, avoid thinking about politics.

Thinking about the law is a world away from thinking about politics. Companies should think about how to comply with regulations, but they should not be biting their nails over whether the candidate who's backing their chemical plant will give a speech about Marijuana decrimininalization that's convincing enough to secure him the position necessary to force the local regulatory body to change the acceptable limits on effluents so that it becomes possible to continue running a process on an old line.

It sounds like you are suggesting that regulations should never change. Is that what you mean?

No. That is not what the other person said.

Did you accidently respond to the wrong comment?

What the person said was that a chemical manufacturing company should not be "biting their nails" over some random Marijuana decrimininalization speech, that a random candidate is making.

At the end he was talking about changing the rules on effluents. I guess I just doing understand what he is trying to say.

Why should the rules on effluents be related to marijuana policy? They shouldn't be. Why are the rules on effluents related to marijuana policy? Because politics works according to public sentiment attached to individual leaders and their parties, and the leaders and parties bundle together large packages of unrelated policies. Hence a chemical plant owner becomes interested in issues that have absolutely nothing to do with his businesses, or even his business' externalities.

It would be nice if it were possible to be apolitical but in many respects it isn't depending on the nature of your business and that's a reality I think some people are reticent to accept. Corporations exist to make money and there isn't an industry out there that doesn't actively lobby in their interest.

Turns out being `apolitical` is kind of a myth.