I DON'T WANT TO BUY THE WORLD A COKE!

Bartow J. Elmore, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (New York & London: Norton, 2014) ("Today, Coke continues to work hard to promote itself as a global citizen capable of building infrastructure that benefits the public at large. But to claim it prudent to nominate our most profitable corporations to be providers of public services in the years ahead would be to ignore history. Proponents of limited government consistently maintain that private industry should take over certain tasks, such as municipal waterworks, that are now being provided by the state. They contend that businesses could run these systems more efficiently and reduce costs to the public. But the chronicle of Citizen Coke's ascendancy offered in this book shows that some of the most profitable businesses of our time have been successful precisely because they have not invested in expensive infrastructural projects. Coke and other profitable low-value consumer goods companies were not the engineers of their destinies but rather businesses dependent upon scaffolding provided by others, and they were far more often the beneficiaries of state support programs than the material developers of technological systems that benefited the public at large. In short, Coke always needed more than it could provide. It was a consumer more than a producer, a company adept at repackaging public resources into private products for profit." Id. at 300-301. From the book jacket: "The costs shed by Coke have fallen on the public at large. Its annual use of many billions of gallons of water has strained an increasingly scarce global resource. Its copious servings of high-fructose corn syrup have threatened public health. Citizen Coke became a giant in a world of abundance. In a world of scarcity it is a strain on resources and all who depend on them." Also see Beth Macy, "The World Buys a Coke," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/4/2015.).