Bristol-Myers Squibb has been developing and marketing ameloriative drugs for HIV and AIDS ten years now, and the pharmaceutical company sponsors a campaign to caretake disease sufferers in Africa, as part of its international foundation. A modest internet event, "Light to Unite," allowed visitors to a website to put a match to a wick and engage one of a total hundred thousand dollars that would go to, this time, the National AIDS Fund.
Charitable extracurriculars disturb the spirit of Milton Friedman, who would say that a company's moral imperative is the legal profit its investors deserve, and anything else is a distraction, best done by eleemosynary parties themselves, but here we are. And here is where measure on measure of corporate altruism is never good enough because — why? Because drug companies, confound them, operate in the free market and those hired to lead them do not object to profit. Ostensibly, detractors would be satisfied if medicine were without patent rights, or came for free, or bubbled up from a public institution.
Or any number of rectifications I heard from a small number of people who thought "Light to Unite" cynical and deceptive. As with most anti-capitalist argumentation, there was contradiction. While one said that not enough money is spent on R&D, another thought new medicines are cheap and easy to make. Dismissing medicinal research as desultory work is, of course, wrong. Even if the creation of a new compound to meet a specific preventative or corrective need weren't enough of a challenge, there is testing and application, and then distribution.
But many have still got the arrangement backwards, and actually believe that companies are obligated to produce medicine for the public; they're not, but rather choose to sell medicine in the market. If business practices offend, these companies can always vacate the market, or will do so out of self-interest like most makers of flu vaccines have over the last couple of decades.
What is so strange about the daydreams about private enterprise is the mistaken impression of secluded executives swimming in cash — when in fact those executives are employees of regular citizens, shareholders, consumers of the company's products.