Americans aren't the only ones captivated by a business life, but it characterizes us in particular. It has always struck me as odd– if not suicidal– that we are concerned more with economic than with public health, more enamoured of individual rather than community rights. My beloved mom, Polly Holmes, was among the first courageous legislators in the 70's to ask whether the rights of the majority to breathe clean air didn't perhaps deserve as much consideration as the rights of a few smokers to ruin that air. Forty years later that issue has been solved and we are rightly incensed when anyone fouls public air with cigarettes. But that's only one battle out of hundreds of similar cases.
Wouldn't it be wonderful to live in a culture where such majority rights were respected and individual liberties only extended as far as public health was not damaged? The concept sounds so reasonable as to be almost unquestionable and yet our culture bows to business and its pursuit of profits at any cost as a kind of religion of free marketeering, rarely stopping to wonder what the difference is between criminal profiteering and legitimate business! So we tolerate attacks on public health as the "free market" at work. All that's really free is profits for the profiteers! The rest of us pay the costs and– so far– pretty quietly. We'd be horrified to find an animal that treats its young as poorly as we do!
To me any business that gives more than it takes– whether socially or environmentally– is legitimate, while those that don't are criminal. If our culture can't find that dividing line, we are doomed to sink deeper into inequality for all. We are not built for that, but for care, for sharing, for community!
Wouldn't it be wonderful to live in a culture where such majority rights were respected and individual liberties only extended as far as public health was not damaged? The concept sounds so reasonable as to be almost unquestionable and yet our culture bows to business and its pursuit of profits at any cost as a kind of religion of free marketeering, rarely stopping to wonder what the difference is between criminal profiteering and legitimate business! So we tolerate attacks on public health as the "free market" at work. All that's really free is profits for the profiteers! The rest of us pay the costs and– so far– pretty quietly. We'd be horrified to find an animal that treats its young as poorly as we do!
To me any business that gives more than it takes– whether socially or environmentally– is legitimate, while those that don't are criminal. If our culture can't find that dividing line, we are doomed to sink deeper into inequality for all. We are not built for that, but for care, for sharing, for community!
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