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]]]]]]]]]]]] PROFIT WITHOUT HONOR HAUNTS US ALL [[[[[[[[[[[[[
By Thomas Sowell (9/29/88)
From the New York Daily News, 14 January 1988, p. 37:1
[Uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
In ancient times, it was said that a prophet was without honor
in his own home. Today, a profit is without honor in the media
and academia.
Nothing is more common than seeing a TV reporter describing
the misdeeds of some businessman and concluding indignantly:
"Human beings were sacrificed for the sake of profit."
Variations on this theme are pervasive at out leading colleges
and universities.
The crusade against profit is irrational. What is really
wrong is that human beings put their own selfish interests ahead
of the well-being of their fellow man. They have been doing this
for thousands of years, long before anybody ever thought of
capitalism or profit.
In a primitive society based on cattle, some people will
sacrifice the well-being -- or the lives -- of others for a
bigger herd. In modern dictatorships, some people sacrifice the
lives of millions for power. In a society based on capitalism,
the same selfishness takes the form of preoccupation with money
-- whether it is for profit, salary or government grants.
Some of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century have come
from attempts to change "the system" so that the particular form
which human selfishness took in that particular system would no
longer exist. Fanatical efforts went into destroying the czarist
regime in Russia and establishing the Communist regime.
You no longer had hereditary despots or "the evils of
capitalism" in Russia. But the new despots outdid the old,
whether in tyranny, terror or slaughter. Both in the political
system and in the economic system, the evils of man were simply
expressed in a different format.
Nothing is easier than attacking a system. All systems --
political, economic or moral -- cramp people's style and they
don't like it. Nothing is more certain than the abuse of power
by those who have it, under any and all systems, so there will
always be legitimate grievances.
The fatal step is to go from grievances to the destruction of
the system under which they occur. Radical critics -- especially
young ones -- are quick to take that step. I must include
myself, since I was a young Marxist. Many things looked bad to
me, so I thought the whole system should be changed from top to
bottom.
What forced me to change my mind was discovering over the
years that things were even worse than I thought. People did
awful things, not just here but all around the world, not just
now but across thousands of years of history.
It was enough to turn your stomach -- and to make you realize
that re-shuffling politicians and re-naming institutions was not
going to do the job, even if you called it a revolution. History
was especially disillusioning. It showed that some of my pet
ideas had already been tried, and had blown up in people's faces.
Not all historic changes have been for the worse. But the
most successful changes have been those that started out
recognizing that man himself is the problem -- and establishing
human institutions to keep any given set of people from having
too much power.
Anyone who has read the "Federalist Papers" knows that those
who wrote the U.S. Constitution had very big doubts about human
beings in general and especially about trusting anybody with
unbridled power. That skepticism shows in the Constitution they
wrote and was a big part of its success over two centuries, while
more ambitious political experiments came and went, or turned
cancerous and stayed.
The economic counterpart of constitutional checks and balances
is an economy where everyone who wants profits -- or wages, or
money in any other form -- has to compete with everybody else.
Its results aren't perfect, but it beats the next best thing by a
big margin.
* * *
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