Fun thing about the free market: when the bad guys win, they take the place of the good guys. Evil will always triumph because good is dumb. So no matter what, the market will always be populated with >90% evil.
Hence, government's job is to limit how much damage evil can do.
Well, that's the thing with corporations. They might be run by people who otherwise have a moral compass, but a corporation's responsibility is abstracted and shared such that in many cases no one person feels a great amount of guilt for actions taken by the corporation. Moral qualms are often suppressed in the pursuit of increasing profits.
That's self-serving bullshit. A corporation is a collection of people. They share no less moral responsibility for their collective actions than would an individual.
Self-serving? Am I or anyone I know on the board of a corporation making morally reprehensible decisions? (Hint: no)
My point about shared/abstracted responsibility wasn't meant to defend or absolve anyone personally, but if you ever ask yourself how [CEO or board member of your favorite villainous corporation] sleeps at night, that was an attempt to explain it in broad terms. If responsibility is seen as shared, humans seem to have an increased psychological ability to internally deflect blame from themselves, in addition to the perception in some cases that they personally will not be punished or fined, rather the abstract corporation will. This in turn reduces the disincentive for behavior that they might not otherwise engage in.
If you'd prefer to believe instead that the problem is that people are running said corporations are simply evil to the core, feel free, but what do you plan to do about that? I tend to think any attempt at a solution should start with reducing the effect of corporate money on legislation and other areas of politics.
