Thoughts on “The Corporation”

I found The Corporation to be informative, however, it only emphasized the idea that corporations only look out for their own interest at the expense of society. I think it is evident that there have been times corporations have gone too far in their search for profits, however, it is also their search for profits that fosters knowledge and innovation. The documentary only touched on negative externalities without mentioning any positive externalities that corporations provide. For instance, pharmaceutical companies only research and develop new drugs because of patents that confer a true monopoly right for a certain period of time. Their new breakthroughs in medicine is a positive externality which other corporations and people benefit from. If they were not able to profit off their research they would not expend the amount of money they do on R&D.  I think it is too unrealistic to want to only take the positive externalities from a transaction without taking the negatives ones as well.

In addition, if it wasn’t for free markets and corporations I imagine our standard of living would be lower and we would be years, if not decades, behind our current level of innovation. Also, given the fact that most small businesses fail, I doubt people would have taken the same risks without limited liability.

After watching the documentary it seems as though the biggest corporations are typically the ones who are willing to maximize profits at the expense of society. I think corporations become greedier as they try to take more of market share and as they do, their psychopathic characteristics seem to intensify. This was illustrated by Fox News’ unwillingness to report the truth regarding Monsanto and telling the reporter that they didn’t care about the truth because they had just paid $3 billion for other news networks.  To me it seems as though a corporation’s size is correlated with their bad behaviour. Their willingness to conduct business with less and less regard for ethical issues increases as they take up more of the market share. It makes me wonder if we would have a different situation if companies were capped at a certain size. I think maybe then we would be able to prevent some of the less ethical actions taken by these large corporations.