On one hand, after backlash from making Dylan Mulvaney a brand ambassador, Bud Light is down to 14th place from 1st place in sales. On the other, Mike Lindell is selling factory equipment because his company got canceled so bad after backing Trump.
You know, I’m pretty OK if companies just get tf out of politics. I don’t want to have to think about what brand of pillow or running shoe or beer or whatever says about who I’d vote for in a general election. It’s hard enough choosing the best product for the best price without adding an entire arbitrary dimension on top of that.
It really reminds me of a comment from Fight club. What does your sofa say about you as a person? Except now it’s What does the brand of some fungible product say about you as a person?
True story here: the reason companies pretend to care about this stuff is that a 2015 study showed that 70% of millennials claimed they would be more likely to pay more for a brand that had supported causes, and in 2014, Pew research found that millennials were more liberal and less conservative – on social views, millennials were 60% to say their views became more liberal. Therefore, to court those buyers companies supported causes, and they supported liberal/left causes.
But you know what? 25 years ago the opposite was true, and the religious right was the dominant cultural force and they were the ones leaning on the scale to get companies to pretend they care about their causes.
But they’re companies. They don’t care about any political cause, it’s just a marketing gimmick. Whoever you are and whatever you support, they’ll use you until they think they can’t make more money off of you then they’ll dump you.
Funnily enough, I expect most people agree with this, but this is the exact line of reasoning that leads to the idea CEOs should only worry about profits, which people hate.
The truth is we haven’t really figured out as a culture what we want big companies to do, exactly. If you like things like complex electronics they (or some version of them) are definitely necessary, and most people want governments to “consult with industry”, but at the same time it’s obviously bad when big tobacco gets to influence public health policy on tobacco.
I personally just want companies and governments to do whatever they want in their permitted space. So that there’d be no need to consult with each other.
Which is in fact similarly bad with every other big industry.
And the other way around, with governments dictating companies what to do, you’ll in fact have exactly the same problem, just harder to see
Typically, governments have a monopoly on power and companies just work underneath them. Is this an anarcho-capitalist thing?
I disagree as a blanket statement. Precision meddling in individual business decisions pretty much always has unintended consequences, but something like a carbon tax can be expected to reduce the amount of carbon emitted at the expense of other things fairly equally.
No, in this particular case it’s an institutionalist thing. A government in its entirety has power, but a government official has only narrow function he should perform, he’s a part of a mechanism and no more. Same with a governmental mechanism. Governmental mechanisms should be limited in what they do. Have fine separation of functionality.
So that government’s interaction with big or small businesses wouldn’t stink of negotiating a deal.
The less specific it is, the better.
Ah. Totally agree. That’s just good policy design.