Do Corporate Subsidies Necessarily Mean Corrupt Intellectuals? Part II

I recently blogged that corporate subsidies of intellectuals do not necessarily mean said intellectuals have been corrupted. I then had an annoying thought: What if the proverbial “pointy-haired bosses” think that pro-business intellectuals have been corrupted anyway?

That might explain why nuclear power has not been defended that energetically by the power utilities, the people you might think would be most eager to do so. (I have encountered some pro-nuclear activists … but they've usually turned out to be Lyndon LaRouche's followers instead of sane people.) The utility executives hear the engineers say that nuclear power is safe and interpret that as meaning the engineers have been corrupted. Since the executives actually do have consciences (I'm going out on a limb here but I figure they might be willing to rook customers a little but they're not out to Destroy the Planet), they try to have as little to do with such an apparently-corrupt technology as possible.

That isn't the only example. This might explain why pharmaceutical companies lobbied against drug reimportation with a campaign that sounded like a standard competition-suppressing move. They heard the real arguments against drug reimportation, figured those arguments were an amateurish imitation of professional monopolists, and went with the usual bullbleep.

Come to think of it, maybe the best reason for intellectuals to avoid corporate subsidies is to convince the capitalists that there are real reasons to defend capitalism.