The Business of Business ought to be Business

The New York Times headline was warning enough:

The Moral Voice of Corporate America

Oh please.

Wearily I turned to the wise, too often neglected words of Milton Friedman:

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.

I turned back to the Times:

[A] surprising group of Americans is testing its moral voice more forcefully than ever: C.E.O.s.

After Nazi-saluting white supremacists rioted in Charlottesville, Va., and President Trump dithered in his response, a chorus of business leaders rose up this past week to condemn hate groups and espouse tolerance and inclusion. And as lawmakers in Texas tried to restrict the rights of transgender people to use public bathrooms, corporate executives joined activists to kill the bill.

These and other actions are part of a broad recasting of the voice of business in the nation’s political and social dialogue, a transformation that has gained momentum in recent years as the country has engaged in fraught debates over everything from climate change to health care.

A transformation that (regardless of whether it is in the interests of a good cause or not–and Trump’s response to the events in Charlottesville was indeed, and to say the least, unimpressive) is beginning to look a lot like corporatism. That’s a term that’s often misunderstood, but this definition from Wikipedia (my emphasis added) will do well enough for now:

Corporatism… is the sociopolitical organization of a society by major interest groups, known as corporate groups, such as agricultural, business, ethnic, labour, military, patronage, or scientific affiliations, on the basis of their common interests…It is theoretically based on the interpretation of a community as an organic body

And it’s worth noting that corporatism fits very uneasily into our understandings of democracy.

Back to the Times:

And in a rebuke to the president, who suggested that both the racist groups and the counterprotesters marching in Charlottesville were to blame for the violence there, a wave of chief executives who had agreed to advise Mr. Trump quit his business advisory councils, leading to the dissolution of two groups.

The forthright engagement of these and other executives with one of the most charged political issues in years — the swelling confidence of a torch-bearing, swastika-saluting, whites-first movement — is “a seminal moment in the history of business in America,” said Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation and a board member at PepsiCo.

“In this maelstrom, the most clarifying voice has been the voice of business,” he said. “These C.E.O.s have taken the risk to speak truth to power.”

Clarifying. Risk. Truth to power.

To repeat myself: Oh please.

The New York Times:

Even this past week, it was easy to discern careful calculations made by executives who chose to speak out against Mr. Trump. Many faced calls to resign from the presidential advisory councils, and the prospect of boycotts if they did not.

But they also faced notable and new kinds of pressure from within — from employees who expect or encourage their company to stake out positions on numerous controversial social or economic causes, and from board members concerned with reputational issues. In the past week, business leaders have responded with all-staff memos and town-hall meetings.

Left out of the discussion (at least judging from this report) were shareholders, the people who, you know, own these companies and for whom these executives, notionally at least, work.

The New York Times writer does mention actions taken by “companies on the conservative end of the ideological spectrum”, citing Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby, but both those companies are privately held and, I suspect, accountable to their shareholders on moral and political issues in a way that the hero CEO’s praised by the New York Times are not.

Starbucks, however, is a public company, and while its record (until very recently) of making money for shareholders has been extraordinarily impressive, it’s still somewhat disquieting to see its chairman (admittedly a virtue-signaler of long standing) come out with mush like this:

“You must define your core purpose for being. We stand in the interest of something greater than just making money.”

Starbucks sells coffee.

Of course, if such public declarations of goodness are good for business, then they are easy to justify, and, to be fair, the writer of the article touches on this:

[S]ome executives have concluded that speaking out on issues of morality can improve more than their reputations — it can benefit recruitment, morale and even sales.

“Even sales”.

That sales come last and are qualified in that way—even— says something, nevertheless…

The article ends on a ringing note: