In the world today, people are pushing more and more for stricter corporate regulations.

Whether it be the Federal Trade Commission pushing for honesty in advertising or the Federal Food and Drug Administration expecting the beef sold in supermarkets to be safe for consumption, corporations are under siege.

People have begun to complain that corporations don’t care about their consumers and  are abusing them. What these people fail to realize is corporations exist to make money, and  this one excuse justifies all of the immoral or unjust actions that a corporation may take.

One example of consumers misunderstanding this idea is the so called hypocrisy displayed by the large holdings company Unilever when it ran its Dove soap “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which was met with much criticism alongside Unilever’s other hygiene product, Axe body spray.

What consumers once again fail to realize is this corporation is well within its rights to deceive customers into thinking  this soulless, emotionless entity really cares about what’s on the inside.

Another example, came during the mid to late 2000s, when many large banks, such as Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch began to offer a new type of home loan, the subprime loan.

These loans were directly targeted at consumers who would have trouble paying off these loans and came with extremely high interest rates. Many of these loans were expected to default, and were sold off by the banks at a profit before they could. This eventually would be one of the main causes of the Great Recession in 2008.

Many have levied criticisms at the banks for lending to such obviously unfit borrowers who the banks knew were going to default.

Finally there is my favorite example of Stratton Oakmont. Stratton Oakmont was a stock trading firm that marketed high-risk penny stocks and defrauded investors with stock sales.

This led to many ludicrous convictions of the heads of the company, including the founder Jordan Belfort, for securities fraud and money laundering. The scheme lost investors approximately $200 million.

What this business was doing is lying to people, which is a staple of all corporations, and to convict a company for swindling its consumers is simply unbelievable.

It is not the corporation’s fault people are stupid and will eat up whatever gruel that you feed them. We need to expect some responsibility from consumers.

I could go on all day about pharmaceutical companies unexpectedly raising the price of life saving medicines to near extortionate levels, or car companies deciding whether a dangerous defect weigh the costs of lawsuits versus recalls, but I have already spent this column stating the obvious.

Corporations should not be subjected to such abuse, they don’t exist to serve people after all. They exist to make money.

Alex Bertsch is the opinion editor for The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected].