Alright home now, brought myself up to speed with some googling.
Okay so it's a kind of certificate not unlike the Australian made/owned golden kangaroo and the Heart Foundation red tick, I think such certifications are a good idea for giving consumers a trustworthy third party to verify the qualities of a product. What I especially like about this is that it's potentially resistant to lobbying as the companies that provide the certifications have no inherent incentive to risk the integrity of their certifications.
However I wouldn't trust them to be self-regulating, governments should demand such certifications be licensed with the government and subject to annual auditing to prevent anti-competitive practices and inherent conflicts of interest. Now this licensing would be a pain in the ass for the certification providers but passing such licensing requirements further solidifies their reputations and they're basically getting money for providing what really ought to be a public service so they have no right to complain.
I have reservations against B-Corp specifically and rather than attacking that specifically I'm instead going to skip to the heart of the issue and explain how I decide what ought to be a public vs private service. Both governments and corporations are inherently self interested however that self interest takes different forms.
For a corporation self-interest is defined by profitability and market share, they are inherently competitive as they have to be forever ready to defend themselves from any and all challengers and adapt to ever changing circumstances. This is why a corporation can never be allowed to achieve an unassailable monopoly, under such circumstances the interests of the company (which are now assured) give way to the interests of the individuals within the company, individuals who only got where they are by being
highly competitive. This invariably results in unchecked profiteering, cronyism, infighting, stagnation, the degradation of products/services and values, exploitation, and finally outright theft just before it all comes crashing down.
This is essentially what happened to the Japanese economy, after being rebuilt economically in the post WWII period the Japanese government seeking to be as competitive as possible on the global market introduced policies of corporate protectionism and other anti-competitive practices. Certain large companies in Japan became effectively government backed, the idea being that they would then go forth and conquer the world economically which for about a decade they did. Then it all came crashing down as those monolithic neigh mega-corporations imploded (indeed this period is where the concept of a "mega-corporation" came from) due to suppressed innovation and systemic incompetence due to a lack of competition.
On the other hand governments always have a monopoly (unless they're in the middle of a civil war) but unlike a corporation which seeks to extract as much wealth from the economy as possible a government's wealth
is the economy of its nation, in other words a government doesn't exist to generate profits, it exists to generate productivity. This is why the Japanese were so thoroughly screwed by their bad policies, they weren't running the country like a country they were running it like a business except that's fundamentally not how countries work.
I work in disaster recovery and when I first started there it shocked me that government disaster relief grants mean we literally give people money, it's not a loan, there's no strings attached, heck we don't even really verify people's identities before we give them the money we just ask their name and birth date and hand it over. How the hell does that work, well it works because first of all it helps people get back on their feet which enables them to return to productivity rather than being a long term liability and even if someone who doesn't need the money gets it as long as they live in the general area of the disaster that money will stimulate the local economy thus enabling a faster recovery and return to productivity.
Corporations operate on the scale of financial years and quarters, governments operate on the scale of fuck you, to a government money is literally just a number, an important number to be sure but only important insofar as its ability to do things. The department I am a part of is but a small part of the tongue a dragon the size of a continent used to lick its wounds, it's not until you see something like that move that you can begin to even comprehend how big it is.
And to think compared to the US, Australia is a relatively small dragon.
Certifying the integrity of corporations is a good idea but the notion that any corporation can achieve any actual beneficial change upon a country on a scale that would actually matter without imploding from its own competitiveness is laughable.
Moreover corporations cannot be entrusted with the public's interests for two reasons:
The first is that simply put people are stupid and cannot be relied upon to exercise conscientiousness in which corporation they support, being "the good guys" is far from being the only marketing strategy or the best.
The second is that the interests of a corporation only align with the public's interests in particular circumstances and even then only superficially, for a corporation any good they do for society is purely an exercise in public relations. A government on the other hand can literally hand out money, that may not always be the most prudent thing to do but it's not the money itself that matters but rather how its used because as long as that money stays in the economy and either generates productivity or brings more money into the economy then the government profits, so to speak.
Now on to my rant proper.
Insurance is something that really ought to be a public service, note when I'm talking about a government I'm not talking about politicians, they're the ass clowns the actual government has to work around to get anything done. The public service is the actual doing-things part of the government and we do a lot of things, all of it (ideally) geared towards increasing the nation's productivity or mitigating things that decrease productivity (like being bombed by a neighboring nation). Anyway back to insurance, these parasites get most of the information they use to make risk assessments which they base their insurances policies on from the government, the Bureau of Statistics or something like that. They then have the audacity to actually to try and weasel out of paying by either putting the onus of proof back on the person who just had their home destroyed or by offering insurance policies which in the first place don't actually cover anything because they're full of fine print loopholes.
We
love nailing these bastard's balls to the proverbial wall.
I also have rants for healthcare, education and social security lined up but I'm getting tired and it's really just more of the same, government good for public interests (insofar as it's not corrupt, damned ass clowns), corporations not good for public interests unless they superficially align with their interests but corporations are good for innovation which is a major driver of productivity and thus prosperity (insofar as a healthy level of competition is maintained).
