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Corporate Social Responsibility - Just Another Interest Group
by Michael J. Hicks
The CSR movement takes our eye off the regulatory role of government.
Identifying corporate villainy is a delightful pastime that virtually all of us have reveled in at some point or another. There are only two problems with this form of entertainment. A description of the first problem comes simply stated to us from the Gospel of John as ‘he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ The second problem is a general lack of intellectual rigor in the debate.
The heavily funded attacks on corporate America come primarily from organizations with their own spotty record of responsible governance. My favorite example comes from the anti-Wal-Mart crowd. It turns out that one union financed, anti-Wal-Mart group hired folks to picket Wal-Mart stores at $2.50 an hour less than Wal-Mart was paying its own workers. These non-unionized temporary workers were protesting working conditions. Oh, how truly delicious this irony.
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