“To each his own”

Today, we are going to divert from our traditional course of examining material solely from scholarly sources- instead, I will be reviewing an article from the New York Times Magazine, which dates back to September 13, 1970. The reason this piece of writing caught my eye was because it was written by none other than Milton Friedman- a famous economist and Nobel Prize winner. Clearly, a scientist of this caliber can contribute a lot to a discussion concerning CSR.

In this article, Professor Friedman argues that the social responsibility of a business is to generate profits, and not engage in “social affairs”. In order to illustrate this point to the masses, he describes the role of a typical executive, elected by shareholder- whose sole purpose is to increase the revenue of an enterprise he is in charge of. If he were to engage in any form of CSR, in the name of the firm, then he would be doing so with someone else’s money- essentially, according to Friedman’s comparison, he would be like a politician, who is implementing taxes and redistributing them to boost social welfare. Friedman concludes his paper by reminding us that, thanks to the American Revolution, the USA already has government, whose functions include properly estimating the funds needed to keep the majority of the public happy- thus eliminating the problem of “taxation without representation”, that had plagued the colonies so long ago.

The issue raised in Professor Friedman’s argument is intriguing, and reveals a rather interesting point: if firms have the capacity to contribute to social welfare, why don’t they just remove “the middleman” and stop paying taxes altogether? Of course, that would mean that the government would be reduced to a passive political body, whose sole function would be to establish favourable tariffs and trade deals for transcontinental companies- just like many economic globalization specialists have already predicted (Michael Nicholson “Globalization, Weak States, Failed States”, 1999). However, that is a rather radical idea, and pursuing it will only lead us to stray away from our initial objective. Regardless, I personally believe that, although Milton Friedman is right about how everything must carry out its own functions- we discovered during our examination of “Corporate Contributions: Altruistic or For-Profit?”, that if a firm properly employs CSR, it could generate plenty of publicity, thus saving the cooperation money in regards to advertising. Therefore, in my opinion, more research needs to be done, before anything definite can be said on the subject at hand.

Refference
Friedman, Milton (1970-09-13). “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”. The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 2018-06-19