The same calculus applies to the politician, you're just imparting certain social duties on one and not the other.
If you want to know why american society is prone to this sort of privitized corruption: this is it. Business is seen as a pure mechanism, but politics is a place of hyper-individualized duty.
In europe, i think the reverse is more often true. Businesses are seen in personalized ways, as having explicit social duties compromised by greed; and politics is a pure mechanism.
Erm no - businesses can also be moral. In fact there's an enormous social pressure to look good. That's why people get fired for things that happen on Twitter.
The only difference is businesses get money for doing something someone else wants, and they need to keep doing that. Politicians take your money and can't even do the one thing they should be doing: be impartial and resistant to even more free money.
> businesses get money for doing something someone else wants
> Politicians take your money and can't even do the one thing they should be doing
^ Here is my issue. This is a cognitive-dissonance. You can equally say: businesses failing their social duty aren't giving society what it wants; rather, they are sating the greed of their customers, shareholders and execs.
Whereas politicians are balancing competing power interests into a compromise piece of legislation with a chance of being passed, and thereby improving the situation; if, very imperfectly.
You see, under these reframings it is the biz failing, not the polician.
to be clear, I do not agree with either framing. My point is only how quickly americans adopt this "if someone's buying, it's excusable" morality as applied to business. As-if politics were a place of heroic powerful individuals, and business merely a mechanism.
The reality is both is true of both. Business can be held to much higher standards; and politicans can be more subtly understood.
> My point is only how quickly americans adopt this "if someone's buying, it's excusable" morality as applied to business.
I'm not sure why you're talking about Americans, but my point is that the main thing a business does is create employment and useful goods or services.
> As-if politics were a place of heroic powerful individuals, and business merely a mechanism.
No, creating employment and useful goods or services is extremely important and heroic. It's just different to being the person who takes money from others on the sole basis that he/she will be impartial and not take bribes.
As a foreigner in America, I think America is culturally particularly business oriented and holds favorable views on business activities (until they get too large and obscure, then they become led by lizards or some such), and in particular I think the average person here is more prone to think that it's ok for a business or person to seek to maximize their position in the market by almost any legal means. As in, if the player is good at the game, you can't blame the player (up to a point).
They should maximise by legal means. That's how you get better service, lower prices and better products. That's why computers aren't $1m each or still in the KHz CPU range. Or why every company is now making electric cars. Or... why most things are as good as they are.
But that's an naive ideological take on the virtues of business; whilst at the same time you offer a naive cynical take on the vices of politics.
D'you not see this sort of double-think taking place?
Exactly the same naive gloss can be given of policitians: their compromises are part of the democratic process by which competing power interests are balanced without oppression. There are no Company Stores, or Company Scrips because corporate power is given "an inch" but no more. And there are FDAs and the like because Society gets its two inches. And so on.
Politicans are creatures of a mechanism as much as businesses.
This "reduce one to mere mechanism, but not the other" is pure naive ideology.
Business does not "offer better prices" etc. through this mechanism. It offers prices every bit as flawed as politics offers policies.
> But that's an naive ideological take on the virtues of business; whilst at the same time you offer a naive cynical take on the vices of politics.
I don't think that's a virtue of businesses. It's their primary function, and their primary good: producing useful stuff or services for their customers, and employment to their employees. The more useful their product/service, the more money they get, and the better their customers' and employees' lives will be. If they campaign to make that easier by making regulation less onerous, that's in pursuit of those primary goals.
That's different to a government job (e.g. in regulation-setting/enforcing) where their sole job is to set and maintain good standards in their area. They provide no value other than that, and if they aren't even doing that, then they're worse than useless. They're useless and they cost money we aren't allowed to refuse to pay.
> It's their primary function, and their primary good: producing useful stuff or services for their customers
This claim is a specific ideological interpretation of business, call it "consumer capitalism".
You can reject than and believe say, "social capitalism" or "democratic capitalism". Where the purpose of business is to, on net, improve society -- and is given a licence to operate only insofar as, on net, it does so.
> their sole job is to set and maintain good standards in their area
Again, call this "noble bureaucracy". You could instead believe, "resolution bureaucracy" where the job of bureaucracy is to prevent conflict, not to resolve to an ideal.
> You can reject than and believe say, "social capitalism" or "democratic capitalism". Where the purpose of business is to, on net, improve society -- and is given a licence to operate only insofar as, on net, it does so.
You could do, but then you have to invent a currency to award to people who you think improve society from your perspective. Or you could just use the existing one.
Businesses routinely do not produce net benefits; routinely do not have efficient prices; routinely benefit their customers at the expense of society; and routinely distribute money away from net goods towards net bads. Indeed it is routine that an efficient market operating at marginal profits is a catastrophe for society: consider social media, climate change, and so on.
This isnt a problem I need to solve for the observation to be true.
The issue I have here is the black/white false perceptions of politics/business.
I don't think this is automatically an ideology. Money is a universal intermediary for exchange of goods and services - "reward" is a bit of a juvenile word for it, but it is obviously an exchange of value.
> Indeed it is routine that an efficient market operating at marginal profits is a catastrophe for society: consider social media, climate change, and so on.
But this is just seeing the bad side, and also assuming that markets somehow are worse than alternatives. Almost everything produced, e.g. the thousands of specialist components that go into your laptop or phone, and them not costing a giant amount of money or advancement, is based on efficient markets. And big government solutions such as communist Russia is much more of a catastrophe, as people tend to be slaughtered or starve to death. Markets, while not perfect, are clearly better than them, even in the worst cases.
If you want a morality police to decide who gets to decide how moral each business is, you have to decide how corruptable that incredibly powerful entity would be, compared to the decentralised market action of customers voluntarily paying for products and services.
Sure: because there's a load of power in politics, it should be minimised where possible, as the state has the ability to take your money and also to lock you up, so the people we pay for with our taxes need to be beyond reproach. There is no natural check and balance that the free market has where if I don't like a product or service, I don't pay for it any more.
They have access to money they take forever, so they need to be held to a higher standard. Thus in general, the market should handle money and not power (as it does, mostly[0]), and the government should handle power.
[0] an example of this probably being a bad idea is private prisons
If you want to know why american society is prone to this sort of privitized corruption: this is it. Business is seen as a pure mechanism, but politics is a place of hyper-individualized duty.
In europe, i think the reverse is more often true. Businesses are seen in personalized ways, as having explicit social duties compromised by greed; and politics is a pure mechanism.