Does the End of Making Money Justify Being Mean?
A couple of decades ago the once prosperous small American town of Flint Michigan, was crushed. Were you to walk down a residential street in Flint, you would see boarded up vacant houses where families once lived. Front lawns that, not to long ago, had children running, laughing, and playing hide and go seek on them, are now unkempt and silent. Were you to look hard enough, you may even see a tumble weed blowing slowly down the street, on it's way out of town like the many families before it. In short, Flint has become a ghost town. What happened in Flint? Was there a war, a famine, or some deadly disease? No, nothing like that. What happened in Flint can't be attributed to any of those things, but it can be attributed to something that many people consider just as potentially dangerous as war or famine. What crushed the small town of Flint was a lack of business ethics. Flint was a town centered around the General Motors car company. Much of the population supported themselves through working in the various jobs that the factory offered. Most of the rest of the town supported themselves by selling goods and services to the people who worked for GM. One day Gm decided it would be best for the business if they packed u
"The business of business is business" has developed into a trademark saying in today's corporate America. Many large companies have the philosophy that a businesses' only responsibility lies in making as much money as possible for the shareholders. Milton Friedman, who argues that businesses should not be socially responsible, says that "The manager (of a business) is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation and his primary responsibility is to them".(Friedman 12) Friedman goes on to say that when a CEO of a corporation spends corporate money on society, he is, in effect, taxing the share holders without representation. I would agree that the primary responsibility of a business manger lies in providing as much money as possible for the shareholders, but, many times, social responsibility can be profitable for a company, which means more money for the shareholders. "Social responsibility (in business) helps ensure that virtually every quality of a successful company will emerge over time, and thus greatly increase a companies chance of long term success"(Reder 20). When Friedman cries "taxation without representation", he does so in false conjunction with the people who founded our country in order to make the reader feel as if, in order to be patriotic, they have an obligation to oppose socially responsible business. If we look at the reason for our founding fathers cries of, "No taxation without representation", we will see that it wasn't business managers giving something back to the community that supports them, that they were worried about, but was the wealthy government officials getting fat off the peoples hard earned money. It was the oppression of the common people that they were worried about, as are people who support socially responsible business. p and left Flint, so they did just that. As I described above, the effect was devastating to the town. GM laid off 40,000 people in Flint when they closed their factories, not because they didn't have enough money to keep them open, but because, by moving to a cheaper location, i.e. Mexico, they would put a few extra dollars in their shareholders pockets. What happened in Flint is one of many situations in business that have caused the question of whether or not businesses should be socially responsible, to be a widely discussed and debated one. Ralph Estes, a professor at American university in Washington
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Approximate Word count = 1621
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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