Protesters demand answers on the minimum wage, health care, marijuana legalization and other issues at a Feb. 2016 town hall meeting in Charleston, South Carolina. (Photo: J. Ryne Danielson)

“Hey honey, let’s make Molly do more chores for less allowance. I really want to buy that boat.”

Politicians often talk about running government like a business or balancing the federal budget family-style, around the kitchen table. But, imagine the opposite. Imagine running a family like a business.

You don’t have to look far to see how bad an idea that is. Corporate abuses abound.

Consider Vokswagen’s emissions cheating scandal. In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency found that millions of VWs had been programmed to cheat during emissions testing. According to NPR, a device “meant to trick official tests allowed Jettas, Beetles and other cars to emit up to 40 times more pollution than allowed under U.S. emission standards.”

These cars were even eligible for a clean diesel tax credit. Executives at VW clearly made a cost-benefit analysis and decided defrauding U.S. taxpayers and mucking up the environment was worth the risks. Worse, they may have been right. Even with billions of dollars in fines, VW’s profits have surged in the aftermath of the scandal, and they company has mostly shrugged off any public backlash. After all, we sort of expect corporations to behave like this.

Or, what about Apple, one of the most popular and profitable companies in America, despite a history of labor abuses. According to labor activists, Chinese workers in iPhone production facilities are paid so little, they have no choice but to work more than the legal limit just to survive. Metal dust fills the air of Apple’s poorly ventilated facilities, causing respiratory distress and occasionally dust explosions, like one that killed three in Chengdu in 2011. Allegations of child labor also persist, both in Chinese production facilities and African cobalt mines. Apple could fix these problems. But, that would mean sacrificing profit margins and potentially reducing shareholder value.

“We know there are real challenges with artisanal mining of cobalt, but walking away from it indefinitely would be harmful to communities who rely on this mining for their income,” the company said in a 2017 progress report on supplier responsibility.

Apple, like many large corporations, places shareholder value above almost everything else, including human lives and livelihoods. As earnings slow, they have increasingly turned to stock buy-back schemes to prop up stock prices rather than re-investing the mountain of cash — $159 billion — they’re currently sitting on.

To bring it back down to the family level, imagine you’re baking a pie for your children. In this analogy, the pie is wealth, the children are shareholders, and you, the parent, are Apple. Your children want more pie, but rather than investing in the flour, eggs and milk to bake them more, you’ve simply decided to gobble up as much of the existing pie as possible. This doesn’t create more pie, but it means the remaining pieces are worth more to those that have them. It’s a trick no child on Earth would fall for. But, shareholders fall for it all the time.

“For most of the 20th century, stock buybacks were deemed illegal because they were thought to be a form of market manipulation,” says Arne Alsin, writing for Forbes. “But since 1982, when they were essentially legalized by the SEC, buybacks have become perhaps the most popular financial engineering tool in the C-Suite toolshed. And it’s obvious why Wall Street loves them: buying back company stock can inflate a company’s share price and boots its earnings per share — metrics that often guide lucrative executive bonuses.”

A new study on Seattle’s $13 minimum wage, which took effect last year, shows companies often refuse to invest in their workers even when the law demands they do. The paper, published by the University of Washington, hasn’t undergone peer review and contradicts some previous research, but if taken at face value indicates the average low-wage worker’s paycheck declined by about $125 after the January 2016 wage hike.

Rather than paying a living wage, businesses cut jobs and hours.

There may be some problems with methodology, but those will shake out in the peer review process. If true, it indicates that large businesses are more than willing to cut worker pay rather than take even a minor hit to their own bottom lines.

If families made decisions this way, we’d call them greedy. If those decisions cost lives, we’d hold them accountable. But, we give businesses a pass because we imagine they’re following some natural law of economics. They aren’t. They are making choices to put profit over people.

It’s beyond time we brought ethics back into business and took owners to task for their actions, not only through the law, but through boycotts and public accountability campaigns. Because, if we ran our families like some CEOs run their businesses, we’d be in jail.

“Hey honey, we’re going to have to drop Molly’s health care. It’s really eating into my golfing budget.”