During the trial it was revealed that McDonald’s knew that heating their coffee to this temperature would be dangerous, but they did it anyways because it would save them money. When you serve coffee that is too hot to drink, it will take much longer for a person to drink their coffee, which means that McDonald’s will not have to give out as many free refills of coffee. This policy by the fast food chain is the reason the jury awarded $2.7 million dollars in punitive damages in the McDonald’s hot coffee case. Punitive damages are meant to punish the defendant for their inappropriate business practice.
A lot of people around here say “capitalism” when they mean something more like “the Kali Yūga”, “this fallen world, this vale of tears”, “the age in which the Tao is lost”, or “this age of muck and clay, in which we are lesser than our fathers of iron, who were lesser than their grandfathers of silver, who were lesser still than the ancients of gold.”
The folks who speak this way, if you asked them, “Was there any wrongdoing in the world before the first stock certificate was issued?”, would say “Of course there was!”
If you asked them, “Did pre-capitalist kings or judges ever favor the unjust over the just because the unjust gave them riches?”, they would say “Yes, they did!”
If you asked them, “In ancient times, were there rich and well-fed tribes, and poor and starveling tribes, and did the richer tribes lord over the poorer ones?”, they would say “Certainly.”
Which all goes to show, at some level they do know they’re not really talking about “capitalism” in the economic or historical sense. They’re not talking about an economic structure or a stage of Marxist history. They’re taking about wickedness, graft, injustice, abuse of power – things which are much, much older than capitalism.
They’re merely using their favorite snarl word instead of just saying “evil”.
Ok, and we still create laws to combat it. I don’t think “evil always existed, so let’s not have the FDA because it’s not that we’re protecting citizens from bad food, but simply from evil.”
This is such a weird “I’m 14 and this is deep” take.
Of course it needs laws to curtail the worst of the impacts capitalism has. Capitalism is a system that distributes a finite amount of resources between demand that outstrips supply. It doesn’t concern itself dishonest actors, that is what the judicial system is for. McDonalds was such a dishonest actor and that they got away with it is a failure of the judicial system.
You’re confusing actual institutions with its philosophy.
Capitalism is also not the only system to distribute resources. Capitalism isn’t concerned with anything as it’s not an actual living thing. But to pretend that it doesn’t incentivize ruthlessness or greed is simply untrue.