If large corporations are greedy and dishonest, who is banishing poverty and drudgery from the world?
THE SPORT OF THE season is beating up corporations. Every month it seems a new movie comes out to slate them. Most famous of the genre was Super Size Me, but there were The Corporation and Syriana among others, and the latest is Thank You for Smoking. Someone whose view was entirely shaped by such presentations would have acquired a very firm view about what corporations were like and how they behaved. They would deduce that all of them were rapacious and dishonest, bent on screwing every last penny out of a gullible public they despise. The current fad for “corporate social responsibility” carries with it the not-too-subtle message that corporations left to themselves are not socially responsible. Some pressure groups, including Christian Aid and War on Want, have joined with trade unions and other vested interests to establish the “Corporate Responsibility Coalition” (Core) to lobby for laws restricting the way that businesses operate overseas. Given the known anti-business stance of
