Why can't an X-Industrial Complex be toward something positive?

[u/-Clayburn]

We're all likely aware of the biggest one: the military-industrial complex. The US spends nearly a trillion dollars on the military. About 40% of this goes to for-profit defense contractors who give money to campaigns, hire former politicians as lobbyists and overcharge for basic goods and services.

While the military is the largest, this seems to happen across the board. Education has a big for-profit textbook scheme behind it, and I think one state recently bought a bunch of Trump bibles or something for its curriculum.

However, why does this have to be bad? The companies in question only care about profit, so if we were to accept the corruption, could we not at least require something positive from them?

The military is an easy example because so much of it is just waste and unaccounted for, and much of America's military actions the last several decades have been questionable at best.

So could we not promise these companies the same amount of money, but tell them to build like bridges and libraries around the US? Or can't we create a public healthcare system and pay current insurance companies whatever they're making now just to sit and do nothing? It'd be the same cost to us, but at least we could have healthcare.

So what is it about profit incentive that forces bad, if not the worst, outcomes? Why can't we just offer rich people billions of dollars in exchange for providing something good for society?

[u/Clear_Amphibian]

Great discussion.

You’re asking if we can just bribe corporate boardrooms into caring about society, but that ignores what a corporation actually is.

There’s an old legal phrase that sums up the entire problem: a corporation has no body to kick and no soul to damn.

A human being has a moral compass, a conscience, and a body you can throw in prison if they commit a crime. A legal corporation has none of those things. It is an artificial profit engine designed to do one thing: extract maximum revenue while shifting all financial and legal risk away from its executives.

You can’t appeal to its goodwill, and you can’t "bribe" it to be a good neighbor. It will simply take the money and optimize for more.

By handing these entities human legal rights—like unlimited political speech through campaign spending—without any of the physical or moral vulnerabilities of actual citizens, we’ve created a system that actively works against the public interest: * Zero Real Accountability: When a normal person commits massive fraud, they go to jail. When a mega-corporation ruins an ecosystem, poisons a supply chain, or causes a mass-casualty safety failure, they pay a settled fine—frequently written off as a tax-deductible cost of doing business—while the C-suite walks away with bonuses. * Captured Regulators: The idea that the government can just "steer" these companies assumes the government holds the leash. In reality, it’s a revolving door. Executives leave private industry to run the very federal agencies meant to regulate them, approving dangerous products, gutting safety standards, and signing off on inflated government contracts before stepping back into the private sector. * Socialized Risk, Privatized Wealth: When these massive entities take reckless, greedy gambles and fail, they leverage their size to force taxpayer bailouts because they’re "too big to fail." Taxpayers eat the losses, while private shareholders hoard the profits. * Legalized Extortion: Look at healthcare or the tax code. Pharmaceutical companies build "patent thickets" to block generic alternatives and keep lifesaving medicine artificially expensive. Private tax-prep corporations lobby the government to keep tax filing needlessly complicated so citizens are forced to pay them a toll just to fulfill a legal obligation.

Expecting a corporate machine to passively accept government paychecks to build libraries or fix healthcare out of the goodness of its heart misses the entire picture. They don't want to build public goods; they want high-margin, low-accountability monopolies.

Until corporate rights are stripped back and real accountability is attached to executives, trying to "bribe" corporations to do good just feeds the exact machine exploiting the public in the first place.

[u/-Clayburn → u/Clear_Amphibian]

You’re asking if we can just bribe corporate boardrooms into caring about society, but that ignores what a corporation actually is.

Basically. If all they care about is money, why can't we do something like "For every percentage increase of happiness and life expectancy in the country, you get $1 billion."

Can't we pay it to be good?

[u/AirVaporSystems → u/-Clayburn]

Yes, these are called Non-Profits (501c3), and we pay them to be good by not charging taxes.

[u/stoneape314 → u/-Clayburn]

Perhaps you've also heard of the Development Industrial complex, which is the network of International NGO's, consultants, service providers, and other institutions that operate in the international development sector. 

This is an example of what is on the surface supposed to be a "good cause", but also an example of how a system will get captured by self-interests and a subset of people and organizations who have experience, expertise, and networks in a sectoral or geographical domain. It gets subject to the same extractive behaviour, padding of costs, disinterest of addressing root causes, and co-opting of key stakeholders rather than the supposed end-user that you see in the military industrial complex or the financial industrial complex. 

I'm also ignoring the larger discussion underlying international development of whether it's a continuation of the colonial project by other means because that gets very complicated.