Maggie's Farm

Worth sending to kids and grandkids. This from Judith Cone's Open Letter to Students, via Minding the Campus. One quote:

I experience the hunger in the world for the privilege of creating jobs through entrepreneurship, and then I return to the United States, where I see something that troubles me.

Some students and professors reject business as a morally responsible way to spend one's life. The issue I have is not that some people would rather work in the public sector (government) or the social sector (nonprofit work), but that they assign a higher moral calling to these two sectors than to the private sector (business).

As a college student, you are attempting to gain the knowledge, skills, networks, and inspiration to live a happy, productive, and meaningful life. I like to think of each of you as one unit of creative potential. Looking at it this way means that faculty members are more than dispensers of knowledge. They are guides along your journey, teaching the subjects, passing along beliefs and biases, hopefully inspiring you, and challenging you, to consider the types of people you will become.

Some professors attempt to influence you toward those biases. Some think dismissively of business, for instance, as if society would be better off without it, or they assign pernicious motivations to those who lead businesses. Throughout history, social experiments to this end have failed. Every day, these professors use and benefit from the products and services of business: Google, bookstores, clothing, transportation, and the local coffee shop. They fail to differentiate between business leaders and dismiss the whole sector as greedy, uncaring, and destructive. Yet, even with much evidence of greed and wrongdoing in the public and social sectors, that same categorical condemnation is not present.

The whole letter here. I have seen that anti-business bias often, and it always confuses me because most of what we have and do in this life is thanks to the effort and risk of business folks and the people they employ.

From an economic standpoint, non-profits, government, academia, and even professional people like me are parasitic to the big engine of free enterprise.

I think they look down on it because they know that they are beholden to it, and that makes them feel ashamed. I think it's similar to the effete attitudes towards our military.