International Business and the Common Good: A Response to Manuel Velasquez

The topic of Manuel Velasquez's clear and persuasive paper is of great significance today—far greater than is commonly realized. For multinational corporations have come to play an extraordinary—and largely unchecked—role in shaping the conditions of life today around the world. It is not so much that they have begun to control legislative processes—although there is some of this—as that they have increasingly escaped governmental control by playing governments off one another. Accordingly, the board rooms in New York, Toronto, and Amsterdam have more and more replaced the legislative chambers in Washington, Ottawa, and the Hague as internationally significant centers of power. And where the interests of business and government have tended to merge, there one finds the most powerful international forces in the world today—witness Japan, Inc.