A construction company in Belize gradually hollowed out and ultimately destroyed a 60-foot, 2300-year-old Mayan pyramid to get gravel for paving roads, National Geographic reports.
There are exceptions (executives with a conscience), but mostly capitalism and its companies are about making money, any way they need to. They are all too often amoral, which is why they need to be regulated by a moral community via its elected government. The idea that corporations would all be nice if there were no government or only weak government regulation flies in the face of everything taught us by modern history, going back well before the British East India Company forced the Chinese government to let it addict people to opium. (And, no, it isn’t a sufficient refutation to say that the EIC was originally chartered by the state; the state wasn’t overseeing it out in the Indian Ocean).
Contemporary tobacco companies such as Philip Morris and Reynolds American deliberately slaughter 443,000 Americans a year with their poisonous product, spraying the leaves with extra nicotine to addict their victims. And the government lets them get away with this.
And America’s coal companies spew out toxic mercury and lead and other poisons, which are damaging our health, plus a lion’s share of our carbon dioxide emissions, which are destroying the planet via rapid climate change.
Those two kinds of corporations should just be closed down altogether by a moral community via its elected government.
Road builders, you need, but they obviously need to be watched like a hawk.
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