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Government controlling CSR? Bad Idea

Filed in archive CSR on June 3, 2007

Government controlling CSR? Bad Idea
A few weeks ago I reported on that Fleshman-Hillard survey, and if you will remember, it stated that the American public felt the government should do more to enforce CSR. Personally, I am opposed to this - and I wanted to expose my thought process on why, in the spirit of transparent honesty.

Between the way our military is run, and how the FDA conducts themselves, I hope you can start to get at least some of the gist. My personal political stance aside, the government has a proven consistent tendency of mismanagement.

One thing that citizens of every government tend to forget, is the precise structure of their own government - the paper trail, where the buck stops, and who really answers to whom. America is not a perfect democracy. It is a democratic republic. Which means the people have a very limited say in what an elected official does, once they are elected.

The war in Iraq is a ripe example of this. The large majority of the American public is starkly opposed to the war, and yet our military is still there. President Bush wasn't even elected by popular vote, but rather won the election because of the way votes are divided by state, called the electoral college.

If we the people cannot even keep our own government socially responsible, then what makes you think we can keep our government capable of enforcing corporate social responsibility? The fact of it is, not enough people participate in maintaining government social responsibility, and so they run free with their own agenda all too easily. It is very likely that history could repeat itself with CSR, especially if we just pass the buck to the government.

Handing over CSR to the government would be the lazy duct tape solution. Too many people would rather just be ignorant to what is going on around them, thinking CSR has nothing to do with them, than actually look around and see the lasting effects of what social irresponsibility has done.

You may think you have everything under control, that you have nothing to worry about with regards to CSR. Well let me ask you this - do you know how Red #40 affects you? How about high fructose corn syrup? Oh, and what about those white lines planes leave in the sky sometimes?

You should know - and if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.

Permalink: Government controlling CSR? Bad Idea

Tags: CSR  government  social  development  2007  social+enterprise  social+entrepreneurship  june+2007 

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