Slap on the wrist?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Slap on the wrist?

If you spend even a cursory amount of time investigating this question, you will speedily find yourself reckoning with the answer delivered four decades ago by the economist Milton Friedman: A most emphatic no.

In “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” originally published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in 1970, Friedman, the arch-deacon of free market economics, declared that any businessman who thinks a corporation should take “seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else” was “preaching pure and unadulterated socialism.”

Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades … In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.

The great irony of Friedman’s hard line is that in 1970, his words probably sounded much more extreme than they do today. Despite decades of lip service to the idea of “corporate social responsibility,” the notions that corporations do best when most untrammeled by regulatory constraint or that they should only be guided by a desire to generate the maximum return on investment for their shareholders are now bedrock ideological fixations of the contemporary Republican Party.