Corporations Should Avoid Social Responsibility and Focus on Profit
According to Milton Friedman's The Social Responsibility of a Business is to Increase its Profits, businesses should have no responsibility beyond earning a profit. He believes that social responsibility is a socialist idea because it is essentially a tax that is imposed on employees in the form of lower wages, on owners of corporations in the form of lower profits, or on citizens in the form of higher prices. He finally argues that a business is to engage in activities "designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rule of the game."
Main Claim: Businesses should be socially responsible by earning profits.
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Rebuttal
Of course businesses can have responsibilities; anything that can make decisions has the responsibility to make decisions that do not hurt others. Businesses need to make good decisions and make sure their decisions do not negatively impact those around it.
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Business executives already have the authority to spend the owners' money for business-related activities, so the executives should be able to spend a corporations' money for socially responsible causes.
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Government programs can be initiated so that a company's ultimate intentions will be checked for legitimacy.
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Source: Friedman,
Milton. "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its
Profits." The New York Times 13 Sept. 1970: n. pag. Print.