Right so it's the government's fault for encouraging the corporations to do something they didn't really want to do, which inevitably led to the corporations naked inhuman amoral greed running amock.
Do you think there was a sea change in the base level of greed in the run up to the financial crisis? (Remembering of course that it’s impossible for a corporation to be greedy, only a human being can be so.)
I’ve been beating this drum for more than 10 years. The big story of the financial crisis is that while there was fraud and corruption at the margins, the bulk of the economic dislocation was caused by well intentioned people making good faith decisions that in hindsight proved very foolish. People who had no business buying a home or taking out that loan were. Banks were making the loans not just because there was a global capital glut chasing returns, the credit tranching structures were working, and the ever rising house prices hid any risk. No one in the industry had seen house prices broadly go down in generations. In retrospect there were a number of systemic issues that now seem obvious, but having been there it wasn’t that obvious at the time.
the bulk of the economic dislocation was caused by well intentioned people making good faith decisions that in hindsight proved very foolish
I agree with that. But that comes about because we've arranged our economic activity into monolithic 'corporations' that are immortal, have the legal status of persons, and are compelled to chase shortsighted profit above all else, show no remorse, and any moral wrongdoing is just a slight financial risk to be approached like any other monetary risk.
All the humans working for the oil industry today are making good faith decisions but together they work for a massive unstoppable inhuman juggernaut that is destroying our climate while fighting every attempt to rein it in with every means possible at its disposal.
And yes I can call corporations greedy. They have demanded to be treated as people in the courts of law so I'll judge them as people
Here's the thing. Most corporations today believe in "stakeholder" capitalism . Most follow ESG. This means they explicitly state that they are not all about profit but instead also about making the world a "better" place. And what is the result of that? I would argue that corporations are now more evil than ever.
Capitalism is great, but it only works when founded on a strong moral framework. Christianity served that purpose for the history of capitalism. However, once you abandon or corrupt your morality, then you'll see the majority of corporations do evil things, no matter whether they claim to only care about profits, or whether they claim that they also want to save the environment and bring about equity, inclusivity, or whatever Marxist Utopian ideal is in vogue at the moment.
