Most of us hold an interesting but fallacious cultural myth about large businesses: management‘s job is solely to maximize the return on investment to the stockholders, as if stockholders are the only ones responsible for the existence and health of the business. The myth includes no financial, ethical or legal obligations to society or to a healthy government except what little the law requires.
Without laws enforced by government and mostly voluntary adherence to them by all of us, according to principles we learned through universal education, there would be no mechanism to pool investors’ resources and operate them, no stockholders, no intellectual or property rights. Corporate and intellectual property laws evolved from the 17th century to the present. Government pays for codifying and enforcing them and for universal education that enables us to follow them coherently.
Without an effective transportation infrastructure, largely paid for by government including the education for how business and individuals can use it jointly, policed by government to eliminate “highway robbery” as a cost of business, businesses couldn’t sell to large markets without building in the cost of private security forces and weeks to transport goods.
The list goes on, but many citizens, particularly those of the right wing persuasion, lack any sense of the intimate involvement of a healthy government and an educated society in successful businesses; vital supporting roles which most large corporations get for free!
In reality, corporations and their executives are the greatest recipients of welfare of all our citizenry. Much of this corporate welfare is sucked out of the companies by the executives to pad their salaries, bonuses and benefits. We have created and sustained “hot house” corporations and welfare executives that couldn’t exist in a cold cruel world and yet many citizens and their pandering politicians cry foul when we expect our coddled corporate citizens to contribute their fair share for the health of government and society. There is nothing that the citizens of Greece have done to bankrupt their nation that our corporate citizens and their executives have not done to our economy in spades.
Ed Lee get’s it right. We are all Greeks. The mega-corps and their executives not only get all sorts of subsidies and tax breaks, but in one way or another bet against or short the system. They create collapse, blame the victims (“entitlements are bankrupting the nation”), and then take bailouts when their schemes based on over-leveraged, unregulated speculation go sour. Did I mention that they produce nothing of real value.