The Competitive Enterprise Institute has put together a series of videos called “Policy Translated,” whose purpose, I gather, is to cut through the fog and simplify major policy issues for Americans. You can see the one on corporate social responsibility here. Go ahead and watch. I’ll wait.
If you decided to skip ahead, though, I’ll summarize. Companies contribute everything they need to contribute to society by being in business. They create jobs, pay taxes, make shareholders wealthier (at least ideally) and keep the economy humming with their purchases of goods and services. Demands for companies to do anything more will be the death of capitalism. Or, in a word, refried Milton Friedman.
This whole line of thinking depends upon setting up straw men that have nothing to do with modern thinking about CSR. No reasonable human is dreaming of the day when corporations will take every cent they make – and then some – and hand it over to social agencies. Of course that would destroy capitalism; who would deny that? But that’s not what CSR is about.
This either/or approach to the discussion of corporate responsibility is tiring after a while. For decades, companies voluntarily have set aside resources to do their part to make their communities better. There’s nothing new about this. And there’s nothing to force companies to do so. Companies may feel pressure from demands for corporate responsibility, but the decision of how to respond to that pressure is theirs and theirs alone to make.
Whenever I see these simplistic critiques, I feel like borrowing the line Ronald Reagan used to disarm Jimmy Carter: “There you go again.” (The issue Carter was attacking Reagan on, incidentally and fittingly for this day and age, was health care reform. But that’s another story.)
If the Institute wants to make a real contribution, it can do better than the “take a swipe” videos it has produced. What do you think?
