Ep. 1098 Capitalism, Stakeholders, and "Corporate Social Responsibility"
The Tom Woods Show
Tom Woods
4.8 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2018
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
According to stakeholder theory and the Corporate Social Responsibility movement, it's not enough for a corporation to create products that satisfy consumer preferences and please their stockholders. A much wider range of people, or "stakeholders," should also have a say in the firm's activities -- which should take into account not just the interests of shareholders, but also employees, the community, even society as a whole. Peter Klein joins me to assess and critique all this.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Tom Woods Show, episode 1098. |
| 0:03.4 | Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion. |
| 0:08.0 | Your daily dose of Liberty Education starts here, the Tom Woods Show. |
| 0:14.2 | Folks, like many of us, there's a good chance you were probably a victim of educational |
| 0:18.6 | malpractice. |
| 0:20.1 | Well, undo all that over at libertyclassroom.com, |
| 0:23.7 | where we teach you the history and economics you didn't get in school. |
| 0:28.9 | Hi, everybody, Tom Woods here. I'm talking to Peter Klein again today. He's got a brand new |
| 0:32.6 | co-authored paper on stakeholder theory, which is all the rage these days. It is a subset of or related in some |
| 0:41.2 | way to the corporate social responsibility movement. And of course, you know, we believe corporations |
| 0:46.7 | have no social responsibility. Now, that is not quite right. That's not quite right, but we're going |
| 0:50.9 | to try and sort all this out with Peter Klein, who is Carl Minger |
| 0:54.8 | Research Fellow of the Mezes Institute. He is also a professor of entrepreneurship at the |
| 0:59.8 | Business School at Baylor University and adjunct professor of strategy and management at the |
| 1:05.1 | Norwegian School of Economics. He holds his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. |
| 1:17.9 | He's a former associate editor of the Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, and he is widely, widely published. Peter, welcome back. |
| 1:27.9 | Thanks, Tom. Great to be with you again. I did a whole episode on the corporate social responsibility movement, but I was looking at it. It's nearly three years ago now. It was with Jim Audison, who's been interested in this sort of subject, but three years. And plus, |
| 1:31.9 | your paper goes well beyond that. So let's get down into it. What is meant by stakeholder, |
| 1:40.4 | and how does the idea of a stakeholder differ from the idea of a shareholder? I think that's the most |
| 1:45.0 | fundamental question. Yeah, well, we see the term stakeholders used more and more these days, |
| 1:50.7 | so this is a great opportunity to sort of clear the waters a little bit. You know, we all understand |
| 1:57.4 | mom and pop stores. We understand medium-sized companies and to some extent large companies, right? So a mom and pop stores. We understand medium-sized companies and to some extent large |
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