If siding with human rights helps make money they will side with human rights, if genocide helps make even more money they will side with genocide.
As long as Capitalism is the main economic system this will always be only about the profits.
I’m less worried about typical profit-mongering than I am about the corporate owned media however - media has a powerful ability to skew and censor truthful news.
But until then, the bad and misleading products are quite profitable for those engaging in the bad practices, thereby ensuring the behavior will continue to happen. Once they're "found out", they'll just re-brand or move to some other garbage to manufacture.
When a true free market is allowed to operate (which happens all the time in many aspects of our economy), it is the most democratic meritocratic and fair way to exchange goods and services, and accumulate wealth. Pure capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than any other system or system of government in the history of mankind.
I also think you would find it very hard to point at an example of a working free market that has not devolved into an oligopoly, with no govrnment support at all; nevermind one that has produced large-scale wealth.
Capitalism is by definition a crony one. It has to go in bed with the government, because it's the government that sets the rules.
True free market means one company owning everything.
I disagree. It's a matter of priorities. It's totally possible for a capitalist society to prioritize things like human rights, etc. over profits through political and social means.
I think the main issue here is that capitalist institutions and capitalist thinking are ascendent (in the US at least) while rival political and social institutions and modes of thought that could keep it in check are being hollowed out and weakened.
I believe that is what most people would call socialism. When taken at its root idea anyway.
No, it could also be the society's moral system. For instance, take a hypothetical capitalist society where the shame and stigma of violating human rights is very strong. A business owner there would likely refuse to violate them even if it's very profitable, because doing so would make him a pariah, no "socialism" required.
So in other words it would not be profitable, no?
And the entire thesis behind socialism is that it's morally superior to capitalism, in a similar way that free software is argued as being morally superior to proprietary software.
That's the entire point of Historical Materialism.
Like China?
The goal of capitalism is to maximize production output. Everything else is peripheral. Maybe it's a hard truth to come to grips with, but that is what we need to do in order to move forward on resolving today's issues.
so it sort of did fall into a whataboutism type of distraction cycle.
Theoretically capitalist companies that are censoring important content can be pressured with boycotts over censorship, though I'm not sure how feasible that is here.
Or highlights the relationship between capitalism and censorship when the capital is held by a totalitarian state?
China has quietly sat and waited for the last 50 years while they accrued capital. Now they have it, and they're using it to take control of the same incentive systems that created the developed world. Ignoring the threat that's posed, or ignoring the weakness of those incentive systems is going to be fatal to the ideologies that China has targeted.