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Old 10-31-2004, 05:02 PM   #26
shadowfyr
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Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 310
shadowfyr will become famous soon enough
Actually.. Ironically that is my point. Yes, companies have a board of directors, yes they usually have some system in place to determine course and direction. But unless you are living in China or some other non-democratic system, there are rules that even the government must follow. Businesses can create some internal rules of the sort, but they will only create the ones they think they need. Government intervention is all too often needed because the companies don't have checks and balances. There is no rule that says the board of directors can't fire someone that loses them money, even if that person did it to prevent the serious injury of other people. There is no checks and balances, no system to make sure people make the right decisions or act in a non-destructive way. No rules mandating internal organization that are dedicated to even making sure that what the board of directors are hearing is the truth. You need someone outside of the company to examine records and determine that, yes someone 20 levels below them has been lying and actually saved money by dumping toxic waste illegally, instead of paying for legitimate disposal. Democracies don't trust 'anyone' to do their job without someone looking over their shoulder. Companies often can't or won't look far enough over the shoulder of the people below the top that they can see what is really going on and the people at the top are completely unchecked, except when the shareholders notice them losing money. If they make money, most of the shareholders are never even going to question where it is coming from or what the board is doing. There are no true checks an balances within many companies, so it falls to the government to protect the interests of society in general to provide those. The idea that the thousands of cases where regulations get passed, precisely because companies fail to police themselves, can be ignored in favor of some delusion that everything will all just work out in the end it just that - delusional.

Put simply, we tried it your way and people got hurt and even killed because companies refused to consider society over their own pocket books. They lost any right to go unchecked when they made that choice, so now we don't trust them any more than we trust the government without proper oversight. Yes, in some cases the oversight may be unreasonable, but you only have to look at how many times Microsoft has gotten sued and lost or the tactics of SCO to try to steal something they still can't prove they ever owned, by simply claiming they do own it, to see that in some areas it is also not good enough.
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