We don't need the EPA! Leave corporations to their own devices.

"We don't need the EPA!   Leave corporations to their own devices.  They will do the right thing."    Why I don't think that is true:

In 1996, when I was a student at one of the top private universities in the US, I took a class called 'Present Moral Problems.'  It's the kind of class you take at the end of your college career to fill distribution requirements, and prove you really can communicate in English.  One day in class we were discussing what one's moral responsibilities at work would be if asked by an employer or stockholders to pollute the environment.  Most everyone in the class immediately responded that they were the holders of their own moral compass, and would, of course, do the 'right' thing.  But one student, sitting on the opposite side of the room, separated himself from the rest of us immediately by saying, "If I am the CEO of a corporation, it is my job to make as much money for my stockholders as I am able.  So, if I had waste that would cost a million dollars to dispose of, and the fine for dumping it in the local waterway was only $250,000, then I am being paid to save money.  So I would dump waste in the stream."

This guy was a student in a top tier business school, and I knew him to be a very good student.  He is probably out there somewhere doing his job very well, and according to the moral compass instilled in him by his desire to be successful according to what his school was teaching.  This is why we must have regulation.  Business schools in those days really were teaching their students that it was their job to do the best thing for their corporation, because the government was "expected to balance that with regulation."  This is what a professor in that school told me.