If corporations don't have an obligation to maximize profits for shareholders, then you'd better try and take that argument to shareholders rather than believe someone's opinion piece on the matter.

I didn't say corporations are legally required to seek profits, but they do have profit-seeking obligations in most cases. Without investors' expectations of future profits, those companies wouldn't exist in the first place.

And last I checked, murder is illegal, so no, I can't expect the government to do anything beyond that (as long as that law is enforced).

There is no inherent obligation to maximize profits. Most companies have that as their goal because that's what their shareholders want. But then saying that the manufacturer is obligated to maximize profits is a really bizarre and rather disingenuous way of saying that the people who actually own the manufacturer prioritize profits over lives. They don't have to do that, they just do. There's no "obligation" anywhere in there, just people's preferences. Saying that companies are obligated to maximize profits is just a way of saying that it's OK for people to value money above all else, even the well-being of their fellow humans, as long as there's enough indirection in the process.

Making a company's customers upset tends to have teeth. There's a reason companies spend money on PR instead of just keeping that money as additional profit, after all.

If your neighbor is being a nuisance, it may be more effective to gather up some of the other neighbors and all go over to the fellow and tell him to knock it off.

I don't have any actual solutions to propose here. Maybe it merits legislation, maybe it merits consumer action, maybe it's just an opportunity for some other business to create a competing product. I just don't like criticism of people trying to work around a life threatening problem without also acknowledging the source of the problem, and I especially don't like justifying bad corporate behavior on the mistaken principle that corporations must prioritize profits above all else.

Yes, your neighbor can just ignore you, but he usually won't. Social pressure tends to work. That's just as true of companies as it is for bad neighbors. If your argument is merely that it might not work, then we're completely in agreement.

You can try the social pressure route every time this happens (and if you haven't noticed, this seems to be a recurring issue in health care), but unfortunately that's going to take more effort in the long run with fewer results. Many companies - whether morally justified or not - just won't respond to social pressure.

Or, redirect those efforts into fixing the issue through legislation (either to open up the market to more competition, or to restrict price gouging). That's a battle you only have to win once, so in my opinion, it's a far more effective use of one's time.

But if you prefer to cry out that life isn't fair every time people do things that aren't illegal, that's entirely acceptable. I'm glad to see we still have the liberty to speak our minds, regardless of ideology.

How am I, an average citizen, supposed to fix this issue through legislation? Write to my representative? He'll just throw my letter on the pile, and our useless legislators will continue being useless.

The only way to get any legislative action on this is to get the electorate to care about it so that legislators get convinced that they need to act on this in order to keep their constituency returning to the polls and checking off their name.

And in order to do that, you need to talk about how problematic and reprehensible these moves are, so people actually care about it.

So really, both the social shaming and legislative approaches start out the same way. Unless you think you're talking to a dictator, your "stop whining and pass some laws" approach is nonsensical.

> The only way to get any legislative action on this is to get the electorate to care about it so that legislators get convinced that they need to act on this in order to keep their constituency returning to the polls and checking off their name.

> And in order to do that, you need to talk about how problematic and reprehensible these moves are, so people actually care about it.

It sounds like we're in agreement there. The only difference is, you've expressed an unrealistic expectation with regard to the effectiveness of social pressure directly aimed at the company involved. If history is any guide, we can only expect systemic improvement in this scenario through legislation and/or deregulation. Otherwise, you're merely treating symptoms of the problem, not the cause (and no, the cause isn't capitalism or profit-seeking companies as many may have you believe).

Now, if trying to fix problems in our country through the use of a system of rules and regulations (aka, laws) that has been established for that very purpose is nonsensical, then so be it. I suppose that view is indeed nonsensical in the context of today's prevailing social attitudes.

Fiduciary obligation is complicated and jacking up prices in the short term result in lower profit than keeping prices lower -- if this company wanted to keep the price of the product low, they could easily justify it by arguing that indiscriminately raising the price would invite government regulation and price control (or invite more competition), which would reduce profits in the long run.

Shareholders already know that companies don't have an obligation to maximize profits. Tim Cook among others has made this point forcefully fairly recently.

Shareholders make investment decisions based on their own opinions of which companies are most likely to generate the highest return over their preferred time span. That is not the same thing as believing in an obligation.