06-03-2017, 07:39 PM
(06-03-2017, 12:23 AM)Galen Wrote:(06-02-2017, 12:46 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(06-01-2017, 02:19 PM)Galen Wrote: Funny thing is that large corporations are trying to get Trump to stay in the Paris agreement. This is yet anther example of established players asking for regulation. Almost invariably to keep smaller players out and thus reducing competition.
If businesses, whether large or small, cannot do the right thing in regard to protecting the environment on which we all depend, they should not be in business; period. It's usually the big companies, like the car companies now lobbying Trump to repeal car mileage standards, that oppose regulations, while smaller companies like Tesla pioneer green energy.
You have pointed out many times that corporations main purpose is profit. Not something that I would particularly, provided they are getting the money from willing customers and not taxpayers, have a problem with but you do . So let us look at your example of Elon Musk and Tesla. It seems that Elon's ventures get a large amounts of government money. I suspect that if you look into the list of companies in favor of the Paris agreement benefit directly or indirectly while many other businesses will be hurt.
Plenty of economic activities have been profitable. Piracy, slave trafficking, drug dealing, child pornography, gladiatorial games, supplying lions for Roman circuses, transactions in the body parts of endangered creatures, peonage, and outright theft... in such cases profit is a reward for doing great harm. Evil people can exploit the profit motive and thus pervert it into an agency of harm. It is up to the state and any halfway-credible religious authorities to make such deeds so abominable and to make their practive ultimately futile.
Quote:As for the car companies they want to build cars that people actually want to buy with prices customers can afford. This is how an automobile manufacturer makes money. Saying that would seem to be redundant to most people but its hard to say how much Eric the Obtuse actually knows.
No fooling. Of course there is advertising to break sales resistance.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.