Philosophy Now Forum

While ‘prosperous’ Western world governments continue with cuts to social program funding, essentially taking away from those in society with the least in order to allegedly balance budgets, billions in taxpayer loot is handed over annually to individual and even already profitable corporations in the form of overly generous subsidies.
Furthermore, although such prevalent corporate welfare very rarely—if at all—gets mentioned in the mainstream news-media (the majority shareholders of which act as a collective-combined corporate entity), it’ll be readily pardoned under the pretext that all such welfare goes towards creating jobs.
First, the quantity of jobs is relatively very few considering the billions of tax-coffer dollars going into such corporate entities.
Second, the last I read on the topic of corporate welfare, a large majority of such job creation usually goes to sweatshops overseas, typically Asia—where working conditions, environment safety, hours worked per day, minimum ages and wages are notorious for their non-enforcement by local officials there.
While the governments and much of our news-media would turn a convenient blind eye towards such abuse, all wealth categories within our society collectively accept the absurdly low, as very good examples, disability and old-age pension rates.

FrankGSterleJr wrote:While ‘prosperous’ Western world governments continue with cuts to social program funding, essentially taking away from those in society with the least in order to allegedly balance budgets, billions in taxpayer loot is handed over annually to individual and even already profitable corporations in the form of overly generous subsidies.
Furthermore, although such prevalent corporate welfare very rarely—if at all—gets mentioned in the mainstream news-media (the majority shareholders of which act as a collective-combined corporate entity), it’ll be readily pardoned under the pretext that all such welfare goes towards creating jobs.
First, the quantity of jobs is relatively very few considering the billions of tax-coffer dollars going into such corporate entities.
Second, the last I read on the topic of corporate welfare, a large majority of such job creation usually goes to sweatshops overseas, typically Asia—where working conditions, environment safety, hours worked per day, minimum ages and wages are notorious for their non-enforcement by local officials there.
While the governments and much of our news-media would turn a convenient blind eye towards such abuse, all wealth categories within our society collectively accept the absurdly low, as very good examples, disability and old-age pension rates.

They shouldn't, but they do.


The difference is that corporate welfare is give an air of legitimacy. Entrepreneurial initiative is given the opportunity to take over what was traditionally government welfare programmes. On this basis it is essential to blur the distinction between between public and private interests. Such things as bailouts, tax breaks and preferred treatment of government favoured corporations is ignored by the media in favour of heaping economic blame on most vulnerable groups in society.

In other words, is not in the overall interest of society to promote welfare for those who need it most. Instead it is in the interest of everyone to promote corporate welfare.