Re: The Howard Chat session
Just a couple of quick follow=ups.
I don't want to major on ethics or morality.
My main concern is not that customers force moral concerns on companies, but rather that they are able to use their spending power to persuade companies to do whatever it takes to realise the kind of world we want to live in.
This means that we care about how companies make things not just about how efficiently they make them.
Secondly I don't have a problem with companies making money, not even obscene amounts of money.
I have a problem with money being an end rather than a means.
If you need to grow fast and make obscene amounts of money to eliminate global pollution then that's OK, a clean world is a good idea.
If you pretend to be interested in reducing pollution but I can see that in fact your primary objective is to make money to distribute to your shareholders then that's treating something which I see as an end in itself as the means of achieving an end which I think should just be a means (making money).
And its reasonable for me to suspect you of insincerity and to believe that as soon as reducing pollution fails to be the st
rategy which returns best return on your assets you will dump the idea.
As to "post-government capitalism", we are not so far apart.
It is already the case (perhaps always has been) that economic forces are more powerful than any government.
It seems to me that most of the problems which need fixing cannot be fixed by governments (though I think we have to have them), and really the whole point of my conception of a post-capitalist economy is for people to use their spending power (and any other levers they have) to effect those desirable changes on a global scale which governments will never be able to realise.
This means that people have to think about how their spending affects issues like war, poverty, the environment, whatever, and take that into account (which needs they need better information on these things) and companies then will have to take into account the impact of the way they do things on the issues which customers care about.
Ultimately I think the purpose of a company is an essential factor which should influence whether we purchase from them, and wealth accumulation is not a laudable purpose.
Of course corporations do have non financial purposes, but if they are for-profit corporations these are always subsidiary to the profit goals.
I must go back and remove that bit about mothballing factasia since I more inclined right now to get it moving again.
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