Voting for life. Corporate Influence.

[The brief introduction to this exchange is posted on April 19 as VOTING FOR LIFE: PREAMBLE. The following was written on April 16.]#12

Robert writes:Hitler was pro-abortion for ethnic groups he did not like and anti-abortion for ethnic groups he did like.

Like any large organization, corporations can do much good and/or much evil. I'll have to check with our reference librarian, but I would guess that a majority of Americans are part of large corporations, i.e., they benefit from profits in the form of dividends, both as individuals and in pension plans their companies have for them, and, as was reported in a column in the Beacon [Akron Beacon Journal] today, in lower prices which benefit all Americans. They help bring economy of size, and are responsible for increased productivity (although certainly not all they produce is good). Large corporations also support many charities such as the United Way. Of course, they can also exploit workers, the environment, and pay their executives ridiculously high salaries and benefits. Hence, they are a mixed good/evil. Abortion is an unmitigated evil which harms women healthwise, as 31 years of medical research regarding abortion on demand has demonstrated,and well as killing their children.

Of all the issues facing us as a nation, I prioritize, and find abortion to be the most significant, and vote accordingly.

Fanni writes:You finally returned to addressing your single-issue emphasis in politics, and I commend you for doing so. However, what you offer as an argument below is unpersuasive and suggests that you have not thought through a serious justification for it. I will now show you why I think this is so. You write the following

Robert: "Like any large organization, corporations can do much good and/or much evil. I'll have to check with our reference librarian, but I would guess that a majority of Americans are part of large corporations, i.e., they benefit from profits in the form of dividends, both as individuals and in pension plans their companies have for them, and, as was reported in a column in the Beacon [Journal] today, in lower prices which benefit all Americans. They help bring economy of size, and are responsible for increased productivity (although certainly not all they produce is good). Large corporations also support many charities such as the United Way. Of course, they can also exploit workers, the environment, and pay their executives ridiculously high salaries and benefits. Hence, they are a mixed good/evil."

Fanni writes: This is the first half of your argument, in which you establish that corporations are not an unmitigated evil. I agree with the basic premise of the above comments and would only dispute or mark my incomprehension of the claim that "(corporations) bring economy of size," since, as the examples Wal-Mart and many other corporations show, corporations do not bring economy of size; they bring, on the contrary, a quest for the dominance of world markets that is ultimately harmful to market competition (as well as, more immediately, to labor and in many cases environmental standards and to the families whose members are employed there). The only "economy of size" that corporations strive for is in government, which would otherwise be capable of regulating them effectively in the public interest and restraining their tendency to bloat. These off-topic points aside, there is no need to check with your reference librarian concerning the participation of Americans in corporations. I agree that corporations are omnipresent in our lives, and I think that this is true even of those to which we do not belong in some card-carrying way. No American escapes the power of corporations. American society is built upon participation in corporate waste and corporate-driven environmental destruction, most notably in its forcing citizens to rely on individually-operated, polluting vehicles. (As others have noted, "If every country had as many automobiles per capita as the U.S., the world would not be habitable." "The pollution would create a nuclear winter-like condition, blocking out the sun.") This omnipresence of corporations does not, however, mean that corporations and their corporate values become superior to civic, national, or family values. A corporation is an artificial entity dependent for its existence on the renewal of a state charter. This renewal system was intended to be regulatory in nature. All states have the right to suspend the charter if they deem that a given corporation is, for instance, involved in crime, damaging public health, or generally degrading the quality of life of the state's citizens, whether the citizens belong to that corporation in some official manner or not. In practice, however, this regulatory power has been reduced to rubber-stamping as states increasingly override civic values on a number of environmental, development, and labor issues in an attempt to attract corporate money and keep it from floating off to other states.

Enough for our discussion of corporations. That is not the topic we have chosen to focus on, and I agree with the spirit of your first premise. I have criticized the influence of corporations on our government and civic life without erecting them into an unmitigated evil and I accept that they have positive features such as employment.

In the message you are replying to here, I mentioned nefarious corporate influences as one possible example of something which you might see as a more significant threat to human life than abortion. That was the main point of bringing up the example of nefarious corporate influences.

Before addressing the second premise of your argument, I note that you avoided my line of questioning that posited corporate influences as one possible example of something more significant threat to human life than abortion and instead focused on the example that was used to concretize the principle of the questioning. Here is that line of questioning, recopied for your convenience. Unlike my generally critical view of corporations, which is far short of unequivocally equating corporations with "evil" and which, as I said, had in this context the value of an example only, the following line of questioning constitutes the main point of my remarks, and has not yet been responded to:

At what point can you weigh the balances for and, most importantly, against a declared anti-abortion politician? Or can't you? Do you feel you have found the one issue in respect of which you have found a way to assure yourself a righteous vote in every case? Do you feel it is possible for there to be such an issue? Is abortion that one issue? Are there others that would do equally well for the same ends? Or does it stand alone in that respect?