My reader remarks on corporate responsibility vs government responsibility:
This is precisely why I chose the word “effectively” because corporations are not moral actors, good or bad. But our current legal landscape allows them to act amorally to maximize their profits, and externalize their costs. And they do this because they’ve captured to a great extent the government whose responsibility you say it is to restrain that behavior.
Yes, capture is a well-known phenomenon, and no doubt explains some of the odder laws we run across these days. For example, consider this, from Daniel Webster at something called TEDMED:
Whether a gun dealer allows illegal straw purchases, colludes with gun traffickers, or fails to secure his guns depends on whether our policies hold them accountable.
Here’s a perfect example. In 1999, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms – the ATF – published a report identifying the gun stores that had sold the most guns that were later connected to crime.10 At the top of the list – the nation’s leading seller of crime guns – was a gun shop near Milwaukee, Badger Guns & Ammo.
Within days of ATF’s releasing the data, Badger’s owners announced that they would voluntarily take measures to prevent their guns from being used in crime.
What happened next was amazing. The rate at which new guns were diverted to criminals after being sold by Badger immediately dropped 77%.
But in 2003, Congress passed a new law to protect gun dealers like Badger and prohibit the ATF from publishing or sharing data connecting crime guns to the gun dealers who had sold them.12
If the owners of Badger Guns & Ammo were polite, they sent a thank you note to Congress. The rate at which their new gun sales were going to criminals immediately shot up 200% immediately after the law.13 By 2005, Badger was back on top as the nation’s #1 seller of guns used in crimes.
Or think of the “Dickey Amendment,” which chilled government research into gun violence – apparently, the wording may be clarified to indicate that research isn’t prohibited. No doubt, whatever the identity of the captors of Congress in regards to this issue will not be pleased.
Returning to my writer’s point, yes, I think the scope of the government’s remit is the good of the people. Government has the resources, and more importantly, no one else is going to take that responsibility on. Corporations focus on provision of goods and services in return for money, and that’s more or less it – and it’s a little hard to blame them, since the resources required simply to envision the current status of the nation are beyond nearly any corporate entity – and, if they are available, they are often earmarked for dividends to the shareholders.
Sometimes corporate entities are the first to notice a problem, such as the ozone hole discovery my climate scientist friend worked on many years ago – but, as ever, their attention is to their primary mission, not to the country or world.
