selfishness

Archive for Tag “selfishness”

If You’ve Lost Mother Jones, You’ve Lost Cuba

Wednesday, December 15, 2010 by

Following the news that Facebook founder and Time Person of the Year Mark Zuckerberg had signed the Gates/Buffett Giving Pledge, ARC put out a press release arguing that signing the Pledge was not a morally praiseworthy act–that businessmen like Zuckerberg deserve moral credit for creating wealth, not for giving it away.

Nick Baumann of Mother Jones recently linked to it, suggesting, tongue firmly in cheek, that it might be “the best PR ever,” and his comments are getting a fair amount of play around the web. Given all the attention, I would like to recommend that interested readers take a look at the full argument Yaron Brook and I laid out in our original piece on the Pledge.

By the way, I will be discussing the Giving Pledge with Baumann tonight on Thom Hartmann’s TV show The Big Picture.
[Cross-posted from forbes.com]

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Posted in ARI/ARC news, Culture

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Zuckerberg Goes Guilt

Friday, December 10, 2010 by

You may have heard of the trend of businessmen “Going Galt,” i.e., self-confidently declaring that until the government loosens the burdens of backbreaking taxes and onerous regulations, they will scale back their productive efforts rather than work as virtual serfs. (The phrase “Going Galt” is a reference to Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged.) Other businessmen, however, have decided to “Go Guilt,” i.e., to sign Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s “Giving Pledge,” vowing to give away most of the wealth they have earned. The recent news that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has signed the Pledge is making headlines.

To be fair to Zuckerberg, there can be many reasons why he and his fellow “Givers” have signed the Pledge. But as Yaron Brook and I argued in a recent Forbes.com column, the Pledge’s aim is to prey on the (undeserved) guilt many successful businessmen feel.

It is no accident that the Giving Pledge is not a call for charity but a public pledge to give. As Matthew Bishop and Michael Green observe, “Richesse oblige is part of American culture. The peer pressure to give is great (for donors large and small) . . . The Giving Pledge has upped that peer pressure . . .” The Pledge treats your wealth, not as a justly earned reward, but as a gift from society–one that came with plenty of strings attached. The message is: Fulfill the obligation that came with your riches, give your wealth away–or hide your face in shame.

But your wealth was not an undeserved gift. Every dollar in your bank account came from some individual who voluntarily gave it to you–who gave it to you in exchange for a product he judged to be more valuable than his dollar. You have no moral obligation to “give back,” because you didn’t take anything in the first place.

What I didn’t mention in the column was that one of the central issues Ayn Rand addresses in her novel Atlas Shrugged is why so many businessmen feel unearned guilt for their success. That, not coincidentally, is a point I discuss in a post I wrote last year–criticizing the phrase “Going Galt.”

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Posted in Business & Economics

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Brook and Watkins at Forbes.com: The Guilt Pledge

Wednesday, September 22, 2010 by

In our latest Forbes.com column, Yaron Brook and I urge America’s most productive citizens not to sign Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge. From the column:

[Y]our wealth was not an undeserved gift. Every dollar in your bank account came from some individual who voluntarily gave it to you—who gave it to you in exchange for a product he judged to be more valuable than his dollar. You have no moral obligation to “give back,” because you didn’t take anything in the first place.

Whole thing here.

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Posted in ARI/ARC news, Business & Economics

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The Unselfish Bernie Madoff

Friday, June 11, 2010 by

New York magazine’s Steve Fishman just penned a fascinating account of Bernie Madoff’s life behind bars. What I find most fascinating, however, is the reaction from a number of quarters to the effect that Madoff is “thriving behind bars” and living like a “rock star.”

What actually emerges from the article is the exact opposite conclusion: that Madoff was frightened and unhappy before he was caught, and that his life in prison is empty and pathetic.

Take Madoff’s life before he was arrested. According to Fishman:

For Bernie Madoff, living a lie had once been a full-time job, which carried with it a constant, nagging anxiety. “It was a nightmare for me,” he told investigators, using the word over and over, as if he were the real victim. “I wish they caught me six years ago, eight years ago,” he said in a little-noticed interview with them.

And what does life look like for Madoff, now that he’s been caught? As Fishman shows, Madoff lives separated from his family, surrounded by murderers and sex offenders, sweeping floors for fourteen cents and hour, and doing what he can not to fall victim to prison violence. Some rock star.

What comes across from Fishman’s article is that Madoff’s existential life now matches his inner life. A man whose inner life had been a nightmare is now trapped in a literal nightmare.

Madoff is often taken as the preeminent example of selfishness. But what the facts show is not a man who was concerned with his own interests, but rather someone totally uninterested in thinking about what kind of choices would genuinely promote his life. By trying to live like a criminal, rather than as a productive individual, Madoff guaranteed himself a meaningless, joyless, self-destructive  existence. There’s nothing selfish about that.

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Posted in Culture

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