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Originally Posted by roachboy
not in this thread, fta, i haven't. in what i have put up in the context of this thread, the argument should be simple enough to draw out---the claim is that conservative framing of corporate activity as involving primarily the relation of private shareholders to private corporations is dysfunctional--both as a description of corporations (because it is only one relation amongst any number of relations--like (say) that which links and opposes labor to capital)---and because, taken as a way of thinking about neoliberalism, it had lead to disastroud consequences (think the history of structural adjustment programs of the results of capitalist shock therapy)...
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What, exactly, is your definition of 'public' here? It's sounding amazingly broad to me so far.
How are these disastrous consequences caused by the notion of corporations as private?
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Originally Posted by roachboy
i dont understand what you are saying here. the whole idea behind the stakeholder (a term that floats outward from the planet business ethics) is to empower a wider range of groups in the shaping of the factors that, say, a tnc would take into account in making bidness decisions. it was developed explicitly as a critique of the freidmanite view of bidness and its exclusive emphasis on shareholder profits. it is about the notion that corporate activity is political, is public simply because the effects of that activity run WAY beyond the question of whether shareholders make money or not--and that the public should be represented in various ways in the process of fashioning business strategy. whence stakeholder groups.
i take this claim to be self-evident, not in need of any particular defense.
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I misunderstood what you meant by stakeholder. Okay.
If you're talking about external costs like pollution, sure. If you're going beyond that to matters like downsizing or, say, exorbitant CEO compensation, then no, it's not self-evident, and you do need to explain it.
You're certainly free to make odd (well, odd to me) assertions about whether corporations are private in the context of this thread and how much control non-shareholders should properly seek, but if they come without an explanation, then they're not much use to anyone except the like-minded choir.
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both elements are featured in conservative ideology (depending on what sources you have in mind when you happen to generate statements, of course)...so while i am not sure that this line represents a straw man, it is more trivial than the other (about the privateness of corporations and their actions following from the exclusive emphasis on shareholder-corporate entity relations).
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Fair enough on both counts. I'd simply argue that the view I presented is the stronger of the two by far.
Of course capital owners are capable of bad decisions. That pretty much goes without saying. For every 'self-made' millionaire, you'll find a person of mediocre talents who got lucky with a sizable inheritance or an unattentive board of directors or what have you.
One more thing:
Not to speak for loquitur, but the part that irked me wasn't that you disagree with a more popular person like Friedman, but that you called his notions idiotic. At best, 'idiotic' is an exaggeration. At worst, it's as vacuously dismissive as terms like 'fascist' and 'anti-American' often are.