Corporate America/World
One of my concerns with allowing the “free market” to function without any regulation is that since “Corporations” control things, rather than a single human being (who might have feelings and morals), we daily hear a story about some egregious corporate bureaucracy’s failing: today I read about a man who died after he was bumped from an Air France flight and missed his kidney dialysis. Of course, I don’t have all the facts (and I tend to wonder what really went on since the lawsuit was filed a year after his death), and there is no guarantee that if a human being was held responsible, rather than a faceless corporation, that the results would be any different. Nonetheless, I do believe that if Jean-Cyril Spinetta were personally held responsible, that the chance of Air France-KLM becoming more “moral” (humane/compassionate) would be a possibility.
An example of this, in my opinion, is WalMart. When Sam Walton was alive, he considered himself to be the corporation: the company seemed focused on both customers and employees. However, since his death (and the subsequent anonymity of the CEO/Board), the company became focused on only a single thing: lowest prices - and lost its overall moral compass of insuring that Americans (consumers, employees, suppliers) were part of the focus of the company, rather than stock prices and company revenues.
Bill G said,
January 6, 2008 @ 1:56 pm
It seems like the free market is on your side in this, and is not the enemy. For instance, reading this post gives me yet another reason to not fly Air France. At least in air travel we usually have a choice in providers, and can vote with our feet. Coupled with a free press, we the people can exercise pressure on suppliers that need it.
Consider this other situation described in this article:
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/meningitis/Family-of-meningitis-death-teenager.3303685.jp
This is the story of a family whose daughter died due to negligence by the National Health Service in Britain. The NHS is supposed to be Michael Moore’s wet dream of compassionate medical care. In reality it is an organization every bit as driven by money by Wal Mart or Air France, except that it doesn’t have to care about what its customers think about it because it is the only game in town. The NHS’s main goal is to deny treatment to the patients. They accept a much higher rate of erring on the side of too little (or no) treatment that we tolerate in America. My family lived it; I know. I know that some HMOs have the same reputation; however, if there was an HMO as aggressively anti-patient as the NHS is, no one would sign up for it and it would change or go away.
By the way, I saw a documentary on one of the Discovery channels about a new generation of airliners. Apparently having a passenger die in flight is not as rare as you might think. One of the new airplanes actually designed some of the cabin storage so that it would accommodate a body. British Air says about a dozen passengers on their flights die each year during flights, out of 36 million passengers.