What is a socially responsible corporation? Let's start by defining socially responsible. In my opinion, to be socially responsible, one must do something that benefits society. Makes sense, right? If you are socially irresponsible, that would detract from society. Well, what is society? Is it a simple majority of all the human beings on the planet? Is it everyone on the planet? Is it confined to one's community or nation? Is there a certain percentage of any group that would constitute society? These are important questions. For my purposes, I'll define society as the group of people that are most affected by any decision or action that one undertakes. This may be simplistic, but it's my theory, so I'll make up the rules as I go along. What does it mean to be responsible? Does it mean that you sacrifice your own interests for the interests of others? What if your interests coincide with the interests of others, and by sacrificing them, you are also harming a great number of other people. If Exxon/Mobil stopped drilling for oil, many people would be happy. No more destroying the environment. No more adding to the carbon footprint of mankind on the earth. Blah, blah, blah. What about the many thousands of people that would lose their jobs? What about the tremendous spike in the price of gasoline that would accompany the closing of one of the largest suppliers of oil in the world? What about the rise in price of everything that needs to be delivered somewhere in order to be bought buy people all over the world? Would any of the people adversely affected by this consider the decision to be socially responsible? I don't think so. So is responsibility dependant upon your perspective? Maybe. Let's move on. What is a corporation? A corporation is an entity that is created for one thing, and one thing only. That is to make a profit. A corporation cannot be evil. It cannot be good. It can only be exactly what it is. It can either be successful, in which case it enriches a great number of people, in addition to providing a good product for a good price to millions of consumers, or it can go out of business. Unless of course, it is considered by some to be too big to fail, which is another argument entirely. A corporation has no morals. It has no conscience. All it does is try to make money. People within that corporation can have feelings of social responsibility or empathy. They may even make decisions that reflect their own personal feelings and goals, but once those decisions start to hurt the bottom line, there will be repercussions. That is the way things work. At least they would work, if we would let them. And that, in my opinion, is the problem. We have too many people in too many positions with too much authority over things that they have no concept of. Why should Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, AKA the village idiot and his ugly, stupid stepbrother, have anything to do with finance? Neither one of them has ever even held a job. Why should they have the power to decide the future of millions of people that actually live in the real world? What does some career government bureaucrat know about what creates jobs, or costs jobs, or anything that exists outside the sphere of their limited experience? Nothing. And yet, for some reason we entrust these people with the power to pick who should survive and who should die in the corporate world. Why is that? Why do we listen to a complete moron like Joe Biden, no disrespect intended. I'm sure he's a lot of fun at cocktail parties, when he can stay awake of course. And why do we totally disregard the opinions of men who have spent their entire lives studying what makes an economy work and what doesn't? Maybe I'm getting a little off subject here, but why do we expect people that have no idea what they're talking about, to know what they're talking about? So, to be socially responsible, a corporation must benefit society. Even an evil corporation like Exxon/Mobil creates a great deal of benefit to society. Heck, even Walmart helps society, if by helping you mean creating something beneficial to the vast majority of people. When corporations are forced by government bureacracies and special interest groups to expend scarce resources in a vain effort to prove that they are benefiting society in a way that satisfies these very special interests, it costs us all. When Walmart has to pay millions of dollars to hire consultants to prove that they are making an effort to be more socially responsible, over and above the many and varied benefits that they bestow on society simply by existing, who pays the price? Not Walmart, they just pass the cost on to the very people that are supposedly being looked out for by the politicians and do-gooders. So who is being irresponsible? The corporation, which is just doing whatever it can to increase it's profit, because that's what it's supposed to do, even if it means spending millions or billions on a pr campaign to make them more palatable to the social and political elites, or the social and political elites, who make the rest of us pay in a material way for their own easement of conscience? Walmart, by it's very existence, brings a great deal of good to a great part of it's society. The one's that demonize Walmart, and companies like Walmart, do nothing but detract from the benefits provided by Walmart and other corporations. Who is really being irresponsible here? I guess it depends on your perspective, but from where I'm standing, give me more Walmart, and much less government.