By Michael Yang
Recently, Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli was arrested on fraud charges, and unrelated to the arrest, he increased the price of a lifesaving drug by 5000%, making it unavailable to those who need it most, simply to maximize profits. Though his arrest was, in my opinion, correct, more has to be done within the United States to prevent large companies from monopolizing necessities such as medicine, water, and food.
Shkreli was not the only CEO to forgo morality to maximize profit; many companies, such as Nestle and Apple, practice shady techniques in order to maximize profits; for example, Nestle has reportedly continued to extract water from California, despite it undergoing a massive drought, simply to maximize profit. Situations such as these should not happen, and governments should take more actions, and more quickly, to stop corporations and people such as Nestle and Shkreli from manipulating their power to gain more.
Shkreli is a reminder that, to many companies and executives, profits come before ethics. We should use his arrest as a reminder to put morals above profits, and to regulate other companies with questionable morals. Though companies exist to make money, they must abide by the same rules we do, and must be punished for manipulating the market and squandering resources, as seen with companies such as Turing Pharma and Nestle.
http://time.com/4072913/nestle-lawsuit-drought-california/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/business/shkreli-fraud-charges.html?_r=0
