Do all businesses provide a social good?

"All entrepreneurship is social entrepreneurship, just as all business helps provide a social good. The moment we come to accept that, the clearer our view will be of how entrepreneurship can help better our nation and our society," opines Ray Hennesey at Entrepreneur.

He continues:

History has proven beyond argument that companies provide a social and societal good. If anything, instances of corporate malfeasance – Union Carbide in India, the fraud of Enron, and the prevaricating poltroons who sold us Sham-Wows – are the exception, not the rule. The villains with the black hats are indeed the black swans of corporate and capitalist behavior. Most companies are the cats who didn’t get stuck in the tree, so they don’t warrant our attention.

But, for some reason, entrepreneurs themselves have never felt comfortable with capitalism, at least not how it’s positioned in cocktail-party discourse or the mainstream media. So they started calling themselves “social entrepreneurs” or saying they practice "conscious capitalism" (implying, naturally, that all other capitalism was unconscious). Buy our shoes and we will make sure poor kids get a pair, too. Buy our fishing lures and we will save a snail darter.

Today's Question: Do all businesses provide a social good?

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