Oil company CEO: “…it’s true… we do make a lot of money. Or, at least we used to. What do we do with that money? Well, to be honest, that’s really none of your business. If you’re really that interested, what say you get some skin in the game, buy some preferred stock in our company, and then you’ll know what happens to the money because you’ll be getting some of it. That’s why it’s called a profit, hoss. And frankly, we’re not all that concerned with what you think anymore anyway. Why? Because people like you keep electing government officials who won’t even let companies like ours get back to work producing the products we sell. You think our gasoline is expensive now? Keep it up.”
But...
Well, I guess there is nothing wrong *in itself* with making a profit. Rather the question I would ask is, in making that profit, did they engage in unethical proactices or cut corners they should not have done in order to do so? It wasn’t long ago that (a) different oil company(ies) cut corners in their safety record, and caused a major environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. One might ask: is a given company doing their best to minimise such serious risks? Are they exploiting their workers, where they will not be held accountable? Are they otherwise detrimentally affecting people?
Of course the free market could iron out some of these problems, but it requires that shareholders or customers know about the issues, or the cost of ‘voting with their wallets’ is much higher than otherwise (some must have a car, and must have gas to run it on, in this case, say). The profit motive either needs to be tempered by some sort of regulation with appropriate penalties for failing to folow it which would be detramental to profits, or something more than profit motive must be considered (like the ‘stakeholder model’- look it up). Of course with all this, there may be something I’m missing, seeing as my knowledge in economics is limited.
Simply complaining about profit motive is silly, of course- rather it’s the underlying problems. If you can make a huge profit, ethically- fine (just don’t squander your dividends?)
And can one blame Chevron from running the ad they actually did- in order to make money, you need to placate your customers?
(Blaming the price of gas on governments is an easy thing to do, also- what about the price of oil? Or the need to conserve what we have left, seing as it’s only finite?)
I’m pretty sure that companies don’t get dividends, shareholders get dividends. In any event, both people and companies are perfectly free to spend or squander their money on anything (legal) that they please. Nobody’s stopping Al Gore from using up more electricity in a month than most people do in a year, for example. Nor should they.
Yeah, I meant the shareholders in that case, sorry if I appeared mixed up. And yes, they have the freedom to do what they want- but would you not agree they have (as do we all) the [I]private[/I] moral responsibility to use our money wisely, for which we’ll have to give account to God for?
As a Christian I would certainly encourage anyone to be good stewards, but I believe that should be entirely voluntary in terms of the law.