TOPIC: Some people believe that corporations have a responsibility to promote the well-being of the societies and environments in which they operate. Others believe that the only responsibility of corporations, provided they operate within the law, is to make as much money as possible.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.
This issue raises the controversial issue of whether cooperation is responsible to contribute to the people’s well-being in which they do their businesses. Indisputably, like every individual, corporations have to comply with laws that protect environment or well-being of others, however, they don’t have any legal or social responsibility to promote environment or well-being of others.
First of all, in many societies today, corporations are burdened to promote the well-being of others or environment. In the United States, corporations are often taxed addition to their revenue with reasons as diverse as promoting equal education or clearing the rivers in the state they do businesses in as they have to contribute to the society more than any individual or a small business who earns money. There is no legal justification for such extra taxation. For some theorist, the taxation rather than on the revenue is a theft. Since the policies whether to tax a corporation or how much differ in every state in the United States, corporations are being subject to arbitrary decisions of decision makers.
Second, taxing a corporation anything other than its revenue will directly harms economy and society’s well-being. In order to save their businesses or make more money, when corporations are taxed too much, they prefer not to hire more employee or start laying employees off. At the end of the day, because the government wanted to promote the poor in the region by taxing the corporations in the region, more people end up unemployed. This also increase the economic burden on the society since those employed would get government benefits and not contribute to the economy. Now, maybe taxpayer individuals have to be taxed in order to share the economic burden that the society and the government carry. The government could have prevented such outcome by not forcing the corporations to pay more taxes.
Besides, America has economic leverage over other countries because almost all major tech companies are American. Those companies contributed to America’s economy enormously. However, at the end of the day, their reason to exist is to make much money as they can. Even though, most of the founders of those companies are Americans, they would not hesitate if having a business in America is not profitable anymore or not as much as having it in another country. The countries like China and Germany whom their economy also depend on businesses try to attract corporations to their country by offering low or no taxes. Think about if a corporation like Amazon who employs hundreds of thousands of people in America including high-skilled engineers and low-skilled deliverymen, decided to move its business to China because it could make more money there. It would be economically and socially harm to American government and people that is hard to recover from. For some, burdening corporations with promoting well-being of the others or environment would help the poor, however, such move would eventually hurt the poor most as well as overall well-being of society and economy.
