An effective boycott of any large retailer would impact their bottom line, especially since there are other retailers out there. A boycott is the closest thing to a “death penalty” that can be imposed on a corporation.

I no longer purchase Sony products because of the rootkit scandal. Audio CDs were created with a data track that secretly installed software on the PC that took over certain operating system functions. As long as there are other providers, I can still live my life, and the only thing I really give up are movies from Columbia Pictures.

- Ralph (rhyre.wordpress.com)

Analogously, I have heard cattle ranchers say that they hate having to give their cows various hormones, but if they didn’t do so, they’d be out of business in a short time, because of the competition. To solve that kind of problem, you have to change the rules of the game. Otherwise you end up with this kind of classic prisoner’s-dilemma non-zero-sum game, where everybody wants to “cooperate”, but someone will always “defect”, particularly if there are many “players”.

If there were only, say, three cattle ranches, maybe they could all agree to forgo the hormones. Reich in fact points out that having free competition and easy entry into markets tends to exacerbate these problems, because with more players, it’s harder to do cartel-like things even if they are beneficial from a public policy point of view. I really do recommend this book; my own summary cannot do it justice.

And perhaps even, they’re in situations where they would like to do the right thing but can’t and remain competitive, because other companies won’t do the right thing (they’ll do the cheap thing). We should absolutely be looking out for those conditions and trying to fix them, but strictly speaking it doesn’t change the immorality of their actions. Anti-corporate sentiment stems from clear examples of companies killing people, not just stopping them from unionizing. Look at any number of scandals settled for millions of dollars over companies deliberately withholding information about how their products or the manufacturing of their products affects people’s health.

My initial reaction to this paragraph is that it’s outright terrible. First, it only recognizes the rules of the _game_ as having any authority. Moral rules are supposed to go above and beyond all others — you abide by them even if the incentive is to do the opposite. If the executives of Wal-Mart do something clearly immoral that’s in their competitive interest, it’s still clearly immoral. Just because they’re good at the game doesn’t mean they don’t suck at life.

Second, this outlook is overly simplistic. He maybe right — perhaps the Wal-Mart executives are not the most evil individuals on Earth, and perhaps some of their actions really are for the best.

This is why I like Obama. He occasionally talks about trade offs. Stop and think about times you have actually heard a politician say “I think we should do this, but here are the costs…” or “…no, I don’t think we can afford that”.

I have heard Obama say such things, and it is quite jarring to hear it coming out of a politician’s mouth.

Come to France, and you will witness extreme vulnerability to Government monopolies/speculators/frauds and incompetent bureaucrats which have managed to bankrupt the country in a couple of decades. Supercapitalism may have its failings, but those of Undercapitalism combined with HyperGoverment are much worse.

My point is that centralized government interventions with laws and regulations are rarely successful, if they are not supported, or even caused, by general citizens’ sentiment. Wal-Mart can screw over their employees in more ways and faster than Congress can pass laws to prevent them from doing it.

A simple and honest educational campaign can change the fundamental environment in which a company operates – if your customers demand not ‘deals’, but ‘maybe smaller deals, but also fair treatment of employees’, then you change your company’s behaviour to provide that, and you are still maximizing profits, but on a different product.
Unfortunately, in the US it seems the preferred way to be a good citizen is to mostly just buy a lot of stuff around Christmas.

As for the tugging in different directions, that was a completely separate tangent for me; also, I meant it as an analogy for the current market economy, rather than politics. I can probably write for hours about the inefficiencies of the economy – way too many layers of feedback/redistributors, extreme vulnerability to monopolists/speculators/frauds etc.. I feel we can do much better – but that’s probably my idealistic streak, and in any case is a topic for another discussion..

Do you really disagree with that quotation? Don’t you think there are rules? Who do you think sets them?

I’m not sure what change in the individual people you mean. I think everybody tugging in different directions is inevitable; that’s one of the main things politics and democracy are (or should be!) about, to let us all live together peacefully despite our differences, our various motivations, and the conflicts between them.

As long as election results are so heavily biased by large campaign contributions, the political-donor class will have unfair power in this country, and will continue to set the rules in a way that gives much power to our role as customers and shareholders, and much too little power to our role as citizens, in my opinion. Reich refrains from expressing much of an opinion, stressing that we just have to understand the phenomenon and all talk and think about it.