Is Commerce Decent?

Thursday, June 14, 2012 – by Tibor Machan

Dr. Tibor Machan
It is not a waste of time to revisit the topic of business bashing, especially in light of President Obama's current attacks on wealth creation. He says he prefers job creation, as if the latter were possible without the former. (Well, in a tyrannical system it may be, for a while; the population could be coerced to work in, say, labor camps, even if no one were to want the work being performed! Public works projects have something of this about them, actually!)
Some might consider it odd to question whether business or commerce are decent endeavors but given that business is held in low esteem by many cultural commentators, as well as by Hollywood, by pulp fiction writers like John Grisham, by famous directors such as Oliver Stone, and playwrights like the late Arthur Miller (whose Death of a Salesman depicts commerce as a pathetic, lowly profession), the question is not at all negligible. And then there are the likes of Harvard University professor of government, Michael Sandel, whose recent book What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, alleges that there is not much of moral worth to what happens in free markets! (Not that there is anything new about any of this. Earlier, Charles Baudelaire, the famous and widely admired French poet, had said that "Commerce is satanic, because it is the basest and vilest form of egoism. The spirit of every business-man is completely depraved.")
Should we accept this condemnation of a field of work − and its practitioners − that has managed to create prosperity and wealth for not only those who succeed in it but those who are indirect beneficiaries of its products such as universities, museums and think tanks?
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