Both corporations and the American government should bear a certain amount of responsibility for public well-being. They both benefit from money generated from consumers or constituents, respectively, so they have a duty to use that money ethically and in a way that benefits the society in which they operate. However, corporations and governments are fundamentally different institutions, and, because of this, they should be responsible for different things and on different scales. When businesses assume governmental responsibilities and vice versa, we eventually end up with a power vacuum where no one wants to take responsibility for anything consequential. Because corporations are not beholden to their customers in the same way that publicly-elected politicians are to their constituents (or ought to be), the public aid that corporations provide can be self-serving and not accountable to anything but shareholders, and it can be withdrawn at any time (essentially, when profits start to go down). “We were all in this together for a limited time only,” Stewart writes, regarding the precarity of corporate benevolence during the pandemic. When it comes to solving social problems–from filling potholes to “solving” racism–is conditional, corporate help better than no help at all? No matter how many temporary and conditional fixes businesses provide, what these fixes succeed at doing is making us “feel good” while we read headlines about their short-lived benevolent acts, after which we continue to live–impressionably yet still somewhat apathetically–in a malfunctioning society.
Anne S. Thesia
The latest in Smart Shit:
Corporations aren’t going to save America
The danger in corporate solutions to government problems.
“The private sector is increasingly encroaching on the government’s space because the government is leaving so much space to begin with. Corporations are swooping in with solutions because the solutions coming from public officials and entities aren’t working or are nonexistent.”
Read it here: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22585831/starbucks-bathroom-privatization-government
