Jonathan

“Corporate Social Responsibility”

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Rob the BusinessPundit has a post on corporate philanthropy that echoes my own sentiments:

I tend to err on the side of business and say that a business is only responsible for major, direct, negative effects of its policies (like pollution). My problem with making companies too concerned with social activities is that the causes they champion aren’t necessarily the causes I, as a shareholder, would prefer they champion. Why should they get to make the decisions about which charities get funding? Shouldn’t they give that money to shareholders and let them decide what to do with it? Ultimately, I wish these people that hate corporate profits so much would form their own non-profit companies. Let them figure out how to produce pharmaceuticals and computers and cars and everything else without using profitability as a guide. If they succeed, then great we will all be better off. But my guess is that they will fail. When companies follow profit, they follow what consumers want. Profit comes from satisfying consumer needs. That is social responsibility. There is a demand for solutions to societal problems. Over time that demand is being met. That is why a poor person today eats better than a king did several generations ago.

It’s worth reading in full.

UPDATE: Lex and I have a long exchange of views in the comments.

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Greedy Prosecutors

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A typical middle-aged guy with no criminal record, who started taking prescription meds for back pain, became addicted, and got caught, would be treated leniently if he agreed to seek treatment for his addiction. But if you’re famous, perhaps a famous Republican in a pivotal Democratic jurisdiction, they try to nail you.

Limbaugh can afford good legal representation and will probably come out OK. But what does this episode say about the local prosecutors? Maybe there’s so little crime in Palm Beach that they have nothing better to do than pursue this marginal case.

Or maybe the prosecutors’ proposed plea deal was so harsh because it was designed to be rejected (as Limbaugh’s attorney did). The obvious implication is that the prosecutors are either 1) Democratic hacks out for revenge for the 2000 election (or simply against a prominent Republican), 2) trying to prolong resolution of this otherwise minor case in order to advance their own careers, 3) trying to force Limbaugh to go to trial, which would be extremely costly in foregone income to him, even if he were not convicted, or 4) all of the above.

UPDATE: The Florida Attorney General isn’t playing along with the prosecutors, and the prosecutors are backpedaling:

Limbaugh’s attorney, Roy Black, questioned [Palm Beach County State Attorney] Krischer’s motives and said the release was part of a smear campaign. Prosecutors said they believed they were doing the right thing after consulting the law, the attorney general and the Florida Bar. But there was nothing in writing to support or refute their claim that they were following legal advice from the attorney general.

That changed Wednesday with the release of a letter to Palm Beach County prosecutors from Patricia Gleason, general counsel for the attorney general. The letter lent credence to Limbaugh’s claim that the release of the records was improper.

”In this case,” Gleason wrote, “… it seems to me that the purpose in contacting me about this issue may not have been to obtain impartial advice on an open government issue, but rather to use a part of our conversation to justify your office’s decision that the documents should be released. This is disappointing to me personally and professionally.”

Prosecutors dispatched a written reply to Gleason Wednesday stating that they were confident in their decision and consulted her only ”to see if there was anything we may have missed” while researching the issue.

That last quoted paragraph is a doozy. So the prosecutors already knew the answer with confidence but asked the AG anyway? Yeah, right. I’m sure that if the attorney general, a conservative Republican, had agreed with them they would have used his opinion as cover for their treatment of Limbaugh. That would have helped them, and hurt him with Florida Republicans. But he was smart enough not to let the prosecutors use him, so now they are claiming he’s irrelevant. What a bunch of jackasses. It’s too bad they can’t be impeached. (Or can they — does anybody know?)

“Cheap Foreign Labor” and Prison Reform

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Over at The Corner, Mark Krikorian suggested spending funds Bush earmarked for job training on “immigration enforcement” at work sites. The idea is to make cheap immigrant labor less available, and thereby to make domestic ex-convicts more attractive to employers.

But how about streamlining immigration procedures instead? If immigrants will work for lower wages than ex-convicts, artificially restricting the labor market to benefit ex-cons amounts to an indirect and inefficient subsidy. Krikorian ignores the costs to business, and hence consumers, of immigration restrictions that drive up labor costs.

He also ignores the possibility that employers prefer immigrants for many jobs at a given wage level. In that case the better course of action might be to eliminate, or at least lower, minimum wage rates that price less-productive and higher-risk workers out of jobs.

It’s obvious that most immigrants come to this country because they want to work, but we shouldn’t forget that American employers want to hire them. It should be easier for hard-working immigrants to come here without first spending years jumping through bureaucratic hoops.

Prison reform is a separate issue. Ex-convicts may be made employable via training programs (as Bush proposes), by lowering the minimum wage, or even by directly subsidizing employers who hire them. Attempting to increase demand for ex-con labor by driving illegal immigrants — many of whom are illegal mainly because it’s prohibitively difficult and time consuming to become legal — out of the labor market, is a poor alternative.

New Blog Crawler

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Gabe Rivera has a new blog-quoting robot that looks interesting. I’m not sure whether it’s actually updating yet, but it’s a good start. Headline placement is determined by blog linkage ratings.

This kind of news aggregator can be useful if well done (I think this means: specialized, thoughtfully opinionated, and not a Google-style attempt to copy mainstream-journo “headline news” style). Gabe’s site seems to be Anglospheric in orientation. I wish him well.