The most recent issue of The Economist asks “What are companies for?” and predictably finds that they are, or at least should be, profit-making machines. Outsourcing social policy to corporate leaders, rather than the government, leads to confusion and a lack of transparency and accountability. Let businesses make money, and leave the difficult process of balancing of shareholder, worker, and community interests to the public sector.
Readers of this blog will recognize these arguments, because I agree with them. Elizabeth Warren clearly does not; she believes in stakeholder, not shareholder, capitalism. I suspect her response would be something to the effect that corporations benefit from a rigged political system that runs largely on their money, that the inevitable result is regressive tax cuts, imprudent deregulation, and the loss of worker rights, and that changing the rules for corporations is the only way to get them under control. To which I would say, the Obama years show that the system is not as rigged as you say, and that killing the goose by driving up its costs and forcing it to create inferior products is not likely to lead to golden eggs.