As countries get wealthier, the citizenry has more time to forget how economic well-being and rising living standards are actually created. Prosperity is not a natural human condition. In fact, the reverse is true. But when too many people think wealth is a natural state, they believe exercising their political imperatives, for example agitating for entitlements, benefits, hand-outs, redistribution to favoured interests and cronies, constraints on the freedoms of others, has no opportunity cost. When business leaders indulge publicly in such idealism, it becomes even more dangerous. In many businesses today, we observe social responsibility objectives affecting business decisions. What is deemed to be socially responsible, of course, varies by political persuasion. These actions are not costless.
Milton Friedman explained the social responsibility of business in an article published in 1970 by the New York Times Magazine. It is worth every minute of reading time. It should be read and re-read by captains of industry and students alike. I re-print it here in its entirety:
The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits
by Milton Friedman
The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. Copyright @ 1970 by The New York Times Company.
When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the “social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system,” I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life. The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting desirable “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are–or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously–preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.
The discussions of the “social responsibilities of business” are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor. What does it mean to say that “business” has responsibilities? Only people can have responsibilities. A corporation is an artificial person and in this sense may have artificial responsibilities, but “business” as a whole cannot be said to have responsibilities, even in this vague sense. The first step toward clarity in examining the doctrine of the social responsibility of business is to ask precisely what it implies for whom. Continue reading →