If you know there was some product and buying obviously helps fund a sketchy lifestyle, you can compare that businesman’s faulty morals and weigh it against corporate boardrooms. The guy selling stolen jewelry probably has more of a conscience than the company.
Economics is often about externalizing costs that are natural or ones that are moral, emotional and human. I don’t think a single boardmember would ever see their resource extraction through and witness human pain and anguish the way agents of black markets do.
I believe your average sweatshop operator is the criminal you’d be comparing the businessman down the capitalist chain of command and everyone knows than humans are the least moral to traffick. Even if it’s just labor trafficking it’s a bad look. Some poor Bangladeshi overseer probably takes the fall far too often. Not always because his crapshack factory collapsed.
The guy selling stolen jewelry probably has more of a conscience than the company.
I guarantee you Bongbong Marcos does not have a conscience, but that bolsters the point if anything.
