Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

There's no ethics in business. In fact, business has no goal but to make a profit, and no rules but those established by government; why should it be any different for their customers? People have to voluntarily obey the law, and since in many cases regular people don't know what the law is, they follow the ethics ingrained in them by society. Often, the chance of being detected, let alone punished is so remote that only society's conditioning prevents wholesale abandonment of any ethics whatsoever. Overpaid? Keep it. Wrong product? Yours; pirate movies; skip having a ticket by going in the exit; there a thousand different ways to abuse the trust society depends on.

When the relationship between business and consumers becomes adversarial enough; for example, the monopolistic cable provider inexorably raising prices, the resentment of its consumers will lead to pilfering any time the opportunity arises. It's gotten to the point where businesses must provide their own enforcement, private security officers in stores, now twice as many as there are police. When people have to be forced to be ethical by cameras and an army, how is that different than a Police State, and this disparity is only going to increase because unethical consumers are growing at a faster rate than honest ones.