Re: Opinion Capitalists and Other Psychopaths

let's put it this way i never wanted to be a professional anythang



On 5/14/12, nominal9-Bomb-Throwin-Anarchist <nominal9@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 71.... you like the NY Times, don't you?
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/fables-of-wealth.html?_r=1
> By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ Published: May 12, 2012
>
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> Print<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/fables-of-wealth.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print>
> - Reprints
> -
> <http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&opzn&page=www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day&pos=Frame4A&sn2=72270860/53be7632&sn1=a33298ef/27a2b70c&camp=FSL2012_ArticleTools_120x60_1787506b_nyt5&ad=BOSW_120x60_May4_NoText&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efoxsearchlight%2Ecom%2Fbeastsofthesouthernwild>
>
>
> THERE is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are,
> what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider
>
> the following. A recent
> study<http://theweek.com/article/index/225046/why-is-wall-street-full-of-psychopaths>found
> that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are "clinical
> psychopaths," exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and
> an "unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation." (The
> proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study
> <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.abstract>concluded
>
> that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.
>
> The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find
>
> them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and
> capitalism is predicated on bad behavior. This should hardly be news. The
> English writer Bernard Mandeville asserted as much nearly three centuries
> ago in a satirical-poem-cum-philosophical-treatise called "The Fable of the
>
> Bees."
>
> "Private Vices, Publick Benefits" read the book's subtitle. A Machiavelli
> of the economic realm — a man who showed us as we are, not as we like to
> think we are — Mandeville argued that commercial society creates prosperity
>
> by harnessing our natural impulses: fraud, luxury and pride. By "pride"
> Mandeville meant vanity; by "luxury" he meant the desire for sensuous
> indulgence. These create demand, as every ad man knows. On the supply side,
>
> as we'd say, was fraud: "All Trades and Places knew some Cheat, / No
> Calling was without Deceit."
>
> In other words, Enron, BP, Goldman, Philip Morris, G.E., Merck, etc., etc.
> Accounting fraud, tax evasion, toxic dumping, product safety violations,
> bid rigging, overbilling, perjury. The Walmart bribery scandal, the News
> Corp. hacking scandal — just open up the business section on an average
> day. Shafting your workers, hurting your customers, destroying the land.
> Leaving the public to pick up the tab. These aren't anomalies; this is how
> the system works: you get away with what you can and try to weasel out when
>
> you get caught.
>
> I always found the notion of a business school amusing. What kinds of
> courses do they offer? Robbing Widows and Orphans? Grinding the Faces of
> the Poor? Having It Both Ways? Feeding at the Public Trough? There was a
> documentary several years ago called "The Corporation" that accepted the
> premise that corporations are persons and then asked what kind of people
> they are. The answer was, precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others,
> incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests.
>
> There are ethical corporations, yes, and ethical businesspeople, but ethics
>
> in capitalism is purely optional, purely extrinsic. To expect morality in
> the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are
> antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public
> life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market
> is a matter for their own consciences.) Capitalist values are also
> antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of
> republican government require us to consider the interests of others.
> Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have
> us believe that it's every man for himself.
>
> There's been a lot of talk lately about "job creators," a phrase begotten
> by Frank Luntz, the right-wing propaganda guru, on the ghost of Ayn Rand.
> The rich deserve our gratitude as well as everything they have, in other
> words, and all the rest is envy.
>
> First of all, if entrepreneurs are job creators, workers are wealth
> creators. Entrepreneurs use wealth to create jobs for workers. Workers use
> labor to create wealth for entrepreneurs — the excess productivity, over
> and above wages and other compensation, that goes to corporate profits.
> It's neither party's goal to benefit the other, but that's what happens
> nonetheless.
>
> Also, entrepreneurs and the rich are different and only partly overlapping
> categories. Most of the rich are not entrepreneurs; they are executives of
> established corporations, institutional managers of other kinds, the
> wealthiest doctors and lawyers, the most successful entertainers and
> athletes, people who simply inherited their money or, yes, people who work
> on Wall Street.
>
> MOST important, neither entrepreneurs nor the rich have a monopoly on
> brains, sweat or risk. There are scientists — and artists and scholars —
> who are just as smart as any entrepreneur, only they are interested in
> different rewards. A single mother holding down a job and putting herself
> through community college works just as hard as any hedge fund manager. A
> person who takes out a mortgage — or a student
> loan<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/student_loans/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
>
> or who conceives a child — on the strength of a job she knows she could
> lose at any moment (thanks, perhaps, to one of those job creators) assumes
> as much risk as someone who starts a business.
>
> Enormous matters of policy depend on these perceptions: what we're going to
>
> tax, and how much; what we're going to spend, and on whom. But while "job
> creators" may be a new term, the adulation it expresses — and the contempt
> that it so clearly signals — are not. "Poor Americans are urged to hate
> themselves," Kurt Vonnegut wrote in "Slaughterhouse-Five." And so, "they
> mock themselves and glorify their betters." Our most destructive lie, he
> added, "is that it is very easy for any American to make money." The lie
> goes on. The poor are lazy, stupid and evil. The rich are brilliant,
> courageous and good. They shower their beneficence upon the rest of us.
>
> Mandeville believed the individual pursuit of self-interest could redound
> to public benefit, but unlike Adam Smith, he didn't think it did so on its
> own. Smith's "hand" was "invisible" — the automatic operation of the
> market. Mandeville's involved "the dextrous Management of a skilful
> Politician" — in modern terms, legislation, regulation and taxation. Or as
> he versified it, "Vice is beneficial found, / When it's by Justice lopt,
> and bound."
>
> An essayist, critic and the
> author<http://www.amazon.com/William-Deresiewicz/e/B001HCXOYO/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1/190-0104963-3035747>of
> "A Jane Austen Education."
>
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