Anytime a politician complains about companies not doing their part or not paying their taxes all I can hear is you can’t do your own job.
The first rule of leadership is that everything is your fault. If there’s loopholes, close them. If companies are polluting or emitting change the law.
The function of a company is to make money for it’s shareholders. The function of government is to keep them in check.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
The focus on short-term shareholder value is contraproductive. It's bad for the company, it's bad for society.
If there are two rival companies, and one of the two focuses on social initiatives to the detriment of it’s financial competitiveness, then logically the result is that it falls behind it’s less moral competitor until being crushed completely or subsumed.
In this scenario, you’re defacto punishing social initiatives rather than supporting them.
It’s illogical to expect companies to behave in a way that they’ll be punished for.
You clearly blame Milton Friedman.
I blame a political class with no morals or consequences for betraying their electorate. They’re at best too lazy to do what they’re paid to do and at worst utterly corrupt. Either way, they’re responsible.
Lawmakers are the issue, not big tech companies.
I know it’s popular to hate on big tech companies, but many of them are actually doing a lot more to improve the climate impact of their own operations than average or required by law.
Amazon has committed to switching to 100% renewable energy in the next few years and also going completely carbon neutral before the date proposed in the Paris Agreement: https://www.aboutamazon.com/planet/climate-pledge
They’ve also created a program to coordinate with other companies to join the same climate pledge and funded research in the area to the tune of $2 billion (so far): https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/about/the-climate-ple...
I don’t understand why Amazon is the first target that comes to mind when they’re doing more than required to reduce their own and others climate impacts.
It’s not the big tech companies we need to be angry at. It’s the lawmakers who are failing to put appropriate regulations in place and the voters who continue to enable them.