Are corporations by nature rationalist? I don’t think so. As entities their primary duty is to make money for their owners and shareholders. That’s IT. They may make up values statements that are friendly-seeming platitutdes, but the values statements mean nothing, compared to their primary responsibility. They use people, they don’t value them. And they use the planet, but they don’t value it. If it comes to a choice between increasing shareholder profits and protecting the environment, shareholder profits will win EVERY time. It’s what they are: money machines, and nothing else. They’re not human, they’re a legal fiction.
Political parties are corporations, so yeah, you’re right.
And I agree political parties aren’t people, therefore we should stop them from speaking. It’s not like they have anything useful to say anyway. They just lie all the time. And their only purpose is to seek power, not uphold the Constitution and the laws of our land.
There’s not much of a virtue in political parties. They’re just an inevitability, pretty much, and we have to put up with them. Since we aren’t going to ban them (and that would make things worse), inevitably people will organize to some degree. But that doesn’t mean that political parties are a force for good.
Like any large organization, a political party is an organization that (largely) exists to benefit its senior leadership.
Exactly. I just wanted to make the same point Milton Friedman used to make about the evils of business. Whatever issues you might have with business, moving those decisions into the hands of politicians is no better.
Sometimes it can be. Moving the “corrections” part of law enforcement back into the hands of governments would be much, much better (for example). Profit motive and prisons are a terrible combination.
That’s more a case where prison had traditionally been a government function and it got privatized. One thing we’ve learned is that privitization of traditional government functions doesn’t make them work better. It makes them worse. Partly due to cronyism.
Well yeah, government functions. And business functions are done better by business. I was only objecting to the idea that business is a greater evil than government. Government, even in its basic functions, is still pretty awful, it’s just better than business at those functions. But you still have all the problems endemic to government: lack of accountability, non-responsiveness to customers or the needs of the market, cronyism, inefficiency, losing track of money, duplication of effort…
Yes there is – the business of managing prisons. In my opinion, the business of providing health care. The business of education (which involves a lot of private businesses). At least parts of the business of operating and supporting our military (which also involves a lot of private business).
Oh, please. Political parties are typically organized as nonprofits (though the Republican and Democratic parties might as well be profit-making corporations with all the influence that Wall Street has over them) and I was clearly speaking of profit-oriented corporations. However, PACS I believe are also organized as 501cs, and they are just finger puppets for the rich. I say, let George Soros, the Koch Brothers and so forth speak as individuals, just as they vote as individuals, and keep their damn money to themselves and out of politics. If that means the Republicans and Democratic parties get restricted, too … I’m down with that, so long as it’s applied across the board. It’s not like we don’t have hundreds of millions of people who are willing to engage in non-corporate political speech.
In any event, my main point that profit-making corporations are all about the profit and nothing else, still stands. An individual wealthy person or CEO might be able to make responsible judgments about the environment, but they will inevitably be swamped by all their brethren who go wherever the money is and do whatever they have to do to get it.