Aw… and I Never Knew that He Cared…
By Tigerhawk on our masthead quote:
I actually looked at the title banner of the lefty blog Lawyers, Guns and Money and realized why it is a lefty blog…
The founder of that blog is unlikely to succeed in business (were he ever to try), because he has absolutely no clue in the world how important family, friends, and religion (or community, the secular version) are.
I have known a lot of enormously successful businessmen and women in my life, and I have not met one who even hinted that they believed that “family, religion, and friendship” stood in the way of success in business. In fact, most successful people would say the opposite (allowing for a little wiggle room on religion, which is probably optional). At least in real life. In the entertainment industry’s conception of business success you often see this sort of idiocy — bad guy businessmen are a staple of prime time television — but then the entertainment industry is famously left wing.
All righties have something that they most deplore about the political left (and, I suppose, vice versa). For me it is the left’s pervasive view that people in business are less likely to consider the moral implications of the decisions they make, less likely to care about their community, and less likely to help people. Yes, in my years as a corporate lawyer and then public company executive I have encountered a few dirtbags — you find that in any line of work — but the vast majority of people I know think deeply about the rights and wrongs of the tough decisions they have to make literally every day.
One of Tigerhawk’s commenters pointed out that the quote actually comes from Montgomery Burns, and might not be intended as a direct commentary on the value of friends, family, or religion. Really, though, I’m just happy that he cares. I wonder what kind of analysis he would have arrived at if he’d noted some of our earlier masthead quotes (“You know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society”, or “The Shit Has Hit the Fan”); I’m almost tempted to change our quote in order to find out.