The 5 Big Lies About American Business: Combating Smears Against the Free-Market Economy - Softcover
WHY FEEL EMBARRASSED BY BUSINESS?
Every American benefits every day from the phenomenal productivity of the free market, so why do so many people feel guilty or skeptical about our business system? In this passionately argued, eye-opening book, talk-radio star and bestselling author Michael Medved provides detailed and devastating rebuttals to the most widely circulated smears against capitalism.
MYTH: Big business is bad, small business is good.
TRUTH: Every big business began life as a small business, and every small business today yearns for enough success to become a big business tomorrow. For some products—like cars or electrical power—little companies can’t benefit their workers or customers as reliably as huge corporations.
MYTH: Business executives are overpaid and corrupt.
TRUTH: Top leaders will always command top dollar, and a company can’t limit executive pay without limiting its access to talent. Ferocious, long-term competition in the corporate world ultimately rewards focus and hard work, not short cuts and corruption.
MYTH: You can count on better treatment from the government than from business.
TRUTH: If a private company deals with you poorly, you can take your business elsewhere. But with the government’s power, you get only two choices: compliance or jail.
Medved responds to business-bashing lies with the slashing wit, irrefutable facts, fascinating historical nuggets, illuminating anecdotes, and liberating clarity that made him one of the top-ten talk-radio hosts in the United States. This audacious
and urgently needed book provides energy and inspiration for a beleaguered free-market system poised for its unstoppable comeback.
Every American benefits every day from the phenomenal productivity of the free market, so why do so many people feel guilty or skeptical about our business system? In this passionately argued, eye-opening book, talk-radio star and bestselling author Michael Medved provides detailed and devastating rebuttals to the most widely circulated smears against capitalism.
MYTH: Big business is bad, small business is good.
TRUTH: Every big business began life as a small business, and every small business today yearns for enough success to become a big business tomorrow. For some products—like cars or electrical power—little companies can’t benefit their workers or customers as reliably as huge corporations.
MYTH: Business executives are overpaid and corrupt.
TRUTH: Top leaders will always command top dollar, and a company can’t limit executive pay without limiting its access to talent. Ferocious, long-term competition in the corporate world ultimately rewards focus and hard work, not short cuts and corruption.
MYTH: You can count on better treatment from the government than from business.
TRUTH: If a private company deals with you poorly, you can take your business elsewhere. But with the government’s power, you get only two choices: compliance or jail.
Medved responds to business-bashing lies with the slashing wit, irrefutable facts, fascinating historical nuggets, illuminating anecdotes, and liberating clarity that made him one of the top-ten talk-radio hosts in the United States. This audacious
and urgently needed book provides energy and inspiration for a beleaguered free-market system poised for its unstoppable comeback.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
MICHAEL MEDVED’s daily three-hour radio program, The Michael Medved Show, reaches more than four million listeners on more than two hundred stations coast to coast. He is the author of eleven other books, including the bestsellers The 10 Big Lies About America, Hollywood vs. America, Hospital, and What Really Happened to the Class of ’65?, and is a member of USA Today ’s board of contributors. For more than a decade he cohosted Sneak Previews, PBS’s weekly movie review show. An honors graduate of Yale, Medved lives with his family in the Seattle area.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
THE UNACKNOWLEDGED ENTREPRENEUR
When my father died in March 2009, I felt startled by obituaries that identified him as a "scientist and entrepreneur."
A scientist . . . well, of course, but at no point in my life had it occurred to me to describe my dad as an "entrepreneur" or "businessman." When speaking about him, I always proudly announced his profession as "physicist," or "physics professor," or "NASA researcher," or even as "scientist astronaut." (He qualified for the Apollo Program in the late 1960s but never received his final mission assignment from NASA because of some minor problems with his teeth and gums.) At one point during my senior year at Yale, I jokingly introduced my father to my friends as "a member of the military- industrial complex"-a designation my dad always remembered and savored. As an aspiring intellectual, with dreams of future glory in writing or politics, I could handle the idea that my brilliant, adventurous papa played a role in the defense establishment, but I couldn't accept the notion that he qualified as an ordinary, moneygrubbing capitalist. Stressing his government or academic work provided a much better way to impress my pals, or the women I pursued, or even complete strangers, but I've come to realize that this emphasis seriously distorted the focus of his work life.
During the weeklong mourning period for my father, I sat with my brothers in Jerusalem (where my dad chose to spend his final two decades) and we jointly reviewed the way he had invested his eighty- three years. He spent less than nine years as a university professor (part-time at San Diego State and then, briefly, full-time at UCLA), and just five years as an experimenter and prospective astronaut with NASA. He devoted more than forty years, however, to an all-consuming career as an entrepreneur and creator of high-tech companies, building two moderately successful businesses from scratch. First came MERET Inc. (founded in the family den in West L.A., the name stood for Medved Research and Technology), and then JOLT in Jerusalem (another nifty acronym-Jerusalem Optical Link Technology). He toiled lovingly, tirelessly, and joyously on both ventures, providing jobs for scores of bright, eager, mostly younger associates (including my brother Jonathan), before selling each enterprise to much larger, more established firms. Even after he gave up ownership and day-to-day command of JOLT, he retained a position as the firm's "chief scientist" and continued to busy himself with every aspect of the corporation's scientific and commercial affairs. He worked full-time for the company he created until just days before his brief, final hospitalization with recurrent lymphoma.
On the long flight back from Israel, while sorting through a large file of old family letters and clippings from my dad's apartment, I suddenly confronted another uncomfortable realization: it wasn't just my father who had invested most of his energy and ambition in the world of business. By any honest accounting, I'd always earned my own living in some form of corporate, for-profit enterprise as well-either the book business, the radio-TV business, the movie business, the newspaper business, or (for a few years after law school) the political consulting business. My three brothers owed their livelihoods to fiercely competitive commercial careers even more directly-one of them as a well-known venture capitalist and entrepreneur in Israel, another as a marriage and family therapist managing an independent practice in Silicon Valley, and the youngest as a respected executive for the California-based movie-ticketing company Fandango.
Our extended family boasted an even broader, deeper involvement in building businesses. Going back to the immigrant generation, it's true that my father's father toiled with his hands as a salaried barrel maker, but my other grandfather, my mother's father, spent his whole life running small, successful pudding and chocolate companies-first in Germany and later in Philadelphia. His son, my Uncle Fritz, moved with grace and humor through a variety of business positions, including a cherished stint running a popular deli in downtown Philly. Meanwhile, my Uncle Moish, my dad's only brother, became a local legend with his Jewish community activism and his forty years as proprietor and principal of a home electrical service; he decorated his two bright-blue panel trucks with the biblical slogan "Let There Be Light!"
Given this colorful and scrappy background in American commerce, why did my brothers and I share such an awkward reluctance to describe ourselves as a business family, preferring on most occasions to associate ourselves with intellectual, media, or political pursuits? When we owed everything-everything-to the free-market system, why did we feel occasionally embarrassed by our family's business ties, treating the realm of profit-seeking enterprise as a necessary evil rather than a glory of civilization?
Like many other children in countless families across the country, we unresistingly imbibed the antibusiness bias that's pervaded American culture since the Great Depression. We got the message that corporations crushed sensitivity and decency, promoting ruthless manipulation with their crude emphasis on the bottom line, but we never probed too deeply into how, exactly, our parents provided for the pleasant circumstances of our lives. In retrospect, it's amazing that neither my dad nor my uncles nor any of the business-oriented friends of the family ever bothered to correct our puerile assumptions about the corruptions of capitalism. Perhaps they dismissed some of the prevailing ideas as too stupid, too shallow and immature, to merit serious challenge and assumed we would eventually outgrow them as we accumulated practical experience.
As a result, I grew up, like most of my fellow baby boomers (not to mention the offspring of later generations), with an instinctive acceptance of a series of big lies about American business. This book means to answer those distortions with the sort of rebuttals seldom encountered in schools, pop culture, or news media. The economic crisis that shook the country in 2008-2009 makes these responses all the more urgent. The financial reverses afflicting the United States (and all other major economies) encourage the public to believe the worst about our business system and even to expect its imminent demise.
DISMISSING AND DISTRUSTING THE PROFIT MOTIVE
While hard times unquestionably intensify popular suspicions about the values and practices of corporate America, the widespread skepticism toward the market economy began long before the current downturn. Ever since FDR's New Deal of the 1930s, and perhaps since the Progressive Era of thirty years before, the public has expressed queasiness and uncertainty regarding the profit motive. In most quarters of our society there's no shame in possessing money (or the flashy signifiers of wealth and luxury) but there is an odd discomfort in admitting the means by which those resources were acquired. We all benefit from the unparalleled and prodigious productivity of the capitalist system but we feel reluctant to accept the vigorous pursuit of profit at its very core.
Recent surveys, for instance, display startling levels of contempt for leaders of business, reflecting the assumption that entrepreneurs and executives count as sleazy, greedy, selfish, and unreliable. In February 2009, a Harris Interactive poll asked 1,050 respondents if "people on Wall Street" were "as honest and moral as other people"; a stunning 70 percent said "no." In November 2008, an annual Gallup poll evaluated the "Honesty and Ethics of Professions." The category "business executives" ranked near the bottom, even below such frequently reviled occupations as "Lawyers," "Labor Union Leaders," "Funeral Directors," and "Real Estate Agents." (The businessmen beat out only "Congressmen," "Car Salesmen," "Telemarketers," "Advertising Practitioners," and, at the very bottom of the barrel, "Lobbyists.")
In a similar survey of "America's Most Admired Professions" for the Harris organization, the designation "Business Executive" fared even worse. The bulk of 1,020 respondents felt that these capitalist commanders deserved "hardly any prestige at all," ranking them 21st out of 23 categories-barely outpolling only "Stock Broker" and "Real Estate Agent." The most prestigious professions, in order, were "Firefighter," "Doctor," "Nurse," "Scientist," "Teacher," "Military Officer," "Police Officer," "Clergyman," "Farmer," and "Engineer." As Forbes magazine aptly observed, "None of top-ten most admired jobs can be accurately described as being driven by the profit motive-quite a contradiction in a country that was built on it. The A-list is comprised of those who serve others, including engineers (they build things) and farmers (who 'feed the world')."
Surprisingly, this survey appeared in the summer of 2006, well before the financial meltdown of September 2008 provoked a fresh tidal wave of stories about corporate malfeasance and the collapse of capitalism. For a major segment of the public and, perhaps, for a majority, attitudes toward the business community have remained overwhelmingly negative, regardless of the ups and downs of the stock market or the unemployment rate. Most frequently, this antagonism begins in childhood, with school curricula that downplay the prominent participation of corporations, free enterprise, and the accumulation of wealth in the development of the United States.
CENSORING AND SLANTING THE AMERICAN STORY
Even the most cursory examination of elementary and middle school textbooks reveals the present tendency to distort or ignore the role of business in building the country. Consider the national holidays celebrated in the course of an academic year.
*For Thanksgiving, kids learn all about the idealistic Pilgrims and their interaction with the Indians, but hear nothing about their obsessive concern to make their colony profitable or their sponsorship by a for-profit corporation back in England, the London Company.
*Elementary school students prepare for Presidents' Day by studying Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, and Washington, the military hero and Father of Our Country, but they spend no time acknowledging the deep business involvements of both men. Lincoln became prosperous and prominent (by the provincial standards of Springfield, Illinois) by pursuing a career as a corporate lawyer, specializing in representing railroads and other dynamic enterprises. Washington, meanwhile, became one of the richest plantation owners in the colonies through his land investments and the canny management of the resources he acquired after marriage to the wealthy widow Martha. In contrast to his careless Virginia colleague, Thomas Jefferson, he cared deeply about his financial status and avoided debt and money-losing ventures.
*In anticipation of the fireworks of the Fourth of July, most kids get some exposure to the revolutionary slogan "No taxation without representation," but they never connect it to the fact that nearly all our Founders were entrepreneurial merchants and farmers ready to risk their lives to prevent undue governmental interference in their business affairs.
*Finally, we focus on the nation's military history on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, but we seldom acknowledge that the country's greatest military victories owe as much to our economic power and prosperity as to our soldiers' battlefield courage. The Union forces prevailed in the War Between the States because the industrial might of the North easily outproduced the Confederacy. In World War I, America rescued our struggling British and French allies as much with financial support as with a massive expeditionary force, and twenty- seven years later the unprecedented manufacture of planes, warships, tanks, landing craft, and, ultimately, atom bombs played an utterly decisive part in crushing the Germans and the Japanese. In the forty- five-year struggle against Communism in the Cold War, Americans shed blood in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, but finally prevailed because of the vastly superior productivity and prosperity of our economic system.
When social studies classes review stories about American heroes, they naturally feature inspiring tales about the civil rights activism of Martin Luther King, of the pioneering feminism of suffragists like Susan B. Anthony, or the fierce resistance of Indian warriors like Tecumseh or Sitting Bull. Students may even learn of the amazing contributions of "inventor" Thomas Edison, but they'll hear nothing about the time and energy he invested in building major corporations to make sure he enjoyed the monetary rewards of his technological breakthroughs, and vanquished his competitors. Despite media fascination with the current corporate titans like Donald Trump and Bill Gates, no business leader of the past occupies a place on the A- list in the American pantheon. If youngsters hear anything at all about the builders and bosses (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and many more) who made the nation the world's dominant power, they are most likely to concentrate on sneering accounts of their exploitations and predations as "robber barons."
"A TIME BOMB UNDER AMERICAN CAPITALISM"
Literature classes also contribute to the prevailing cynicism about industrialists, entrepreneurs, and financiers; the further students progress in their educations, the greater the chance that they'll learn contempt for business. At the most basic level, commercial success in a market economy stems from the simple expedient of selling a product or service for more than it costs to provide it, just as the steady accumulation of wealth requires nothing more than keeping your expenditures somewhere below your income. These practical imperatives inevitably conflict with the unfocused flightiness of adolescence, so that adolescents (of all ages) contend that the endless repetition of such hardheaded transactions will necessarily deaden the spirit and paralyze the imagination. As young people occupy bedrooms at home or bunk comfortably at college dorms, enjoying the worthy pursuit of educational progress (and weekend partying) financed by their parents' generosity, it's easy to embrace the romantic spirit of the cherished 1806 lyric by William Wordsworth:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
A defender of the market system might point out that the orderly and disciplined process of "getting and spending" is more likely to enhance rather than "lay waste" our powers, but the characterization of business toil as a desensitizing, soul-killing process has kept its hold on artists and intellectuals for more than two centuries.
Unfortunately, most Americans encounter the classics in their English classes several years prior to racking up any meaningful firsthand experience in the world of work, so they're conditioned to expect the worst from the business system before they even enter it. Few citizens will escape from the educational system without encountering Arthur Miller's tragic victim of the American dream, the downtrodden plugger Willy Loman (Low-Man, get it?) from his 1949 classic, Death of a Salesman. In the "Student Companion to Arthur Miller," Susan C. W. Abbotson writes, "Since his college days, Miller had felt that America was being run by men of business who were all after private profit, and who merely used those without wealth as pawns. Thus, it made sense to see money and finance as being behind many American conflicts. Howard Wagner, in 'Death of a Salesman', is the epitome of the cold- hearted businessman, who callously takes away Willy ...
When my father died in March 2009, I felt startled by obituaries that identified him as a "scientist and entrepreneur."
A scientist . . . well, of course, but at no point in my life had it occurred to me to describe my dad as an "entrepreneur" or "businessman." When speaking about him, I always proudly announced his profession as "physicist," or "physics professor," or "NASA researcher," or even as "scientist astronaut." (He qualified for the Apollo Program in the late 1960s but never received his final mission assignment from NASA because of some minor problems with his teeth and gums.) At one point during my senior year at Yale, I jokingly introduced my father to my friends as "a member of the military- industrial complex"-a designation my dad always remembered and savored. As an aspiring intellectual, with dreams of future glory in writing or politics, I could handle the idea that my brilliant, adventurous papa played a role in the defense establishment, but I couldn't accept the notion that he qualified as an ordinary, moneygrubbing capitalist. Stressing his government or academic work provided a much better way to impress my pals, or the women I pursued, or even complete strangers, but I've come to realize that this emphasis seriously distorted the focus of his work life.
During the weeklong mourning period for my father, I sat with my brothers in Jerusalem (where my dad chose to spend his final two decades) and we jointly reviewed the way he had invested his eighty- three years. He spent less than nine years as a university professor (part-time at San Diego State and then, briefly, full-time at UCLA), and just five years as an experimenter and prospective astronaut with NASA. He devoted more than forty years, however, to an all-consuming career as an entrepreneur and creator of high-tech companies, building two moderately successful businesses from scratch. First came MERET Inc. (founded in the family den in West L.A., the name stood for Medved Research and Technology), and then JOLT in Jerusalem (another nifty acronym-Jerusalem Optical Link Technology). He toiled lovingly, tirelessly, and joyously on both ventures, providing jobs for scores of bright, eager, mostly younger associates (including my brother Jonathan), before selling each enterprise to much larger, more established firms. Even after he gave up ownership and day-to-day command of JOLT, he retained a position as the firm's "chief scientist" and continued to busy himself with every aspect of the corporation's scientific and commercial affairs. He worked full-time for the company he created until just days before his brief, final hospitalization with recurrent lymphoma.
On the long flight back from Israel, while sorting through a large file of old family letters and clippings from my dad's apartment, I suddenly confronted another uncomfortable realization: it wasn't just my father who had invested most of his energy and ambition in the world of business. By any honest accounting, I'd always earned my own living in some form of corporate, for-profit enterprise as well-either the book business, the radio-TV business, the movie business, the newspaper business, or (for a few years after law school) the political consulting business. My three brothers owed their livelihoods to fiercely competitive commercial careers even more directly-one of them as a well-known venture capitalist and entrepreneur in Israel, another as a marriage and family therapist managing an independent practice in Silicon Valley, and the youngest as a respected executive for the California-based movie-ticketing company Fandango.
Our extended family boasted an even broader, deeper involvement in building businesses. Going back to the immigrant generation, it's true that my father's father toiled with his hands as a salaried barrel maker, but my other grandfather, my mother's father, spent his whole life running small, successful pudding and chocolate companies-first in Germany and later in Philadelphia. His son, my Uncle Fritz, moved with grace and humor through a variety of business positions, including a cherished stint running a popular deli in downtown Philly. Meanwhile, my Uncle Moish, my dad's only brother, became a local legend with his Jewish community activism and his forty years as proprietor and principal of a home electrical service; he decorated his two bright-blue panel trucks with the biblical slogan "Let There Be Light!"
Given this colorful and scrappy background in American commerce, why did my brothers and I share such an awkward reluctance to describe ourselves as a business family, preferring on most occasions to associate ourselves with intellectual, media, or political pursuits? When we owed everything-everything-to the free-market system, why did we feel occasionally embarrassed by our family's business ties, treating the realm of profit-seeking enterprise as a necessary evil rather than a glory of civilization?
Like many other children in countless families across the country, we unresistingly imbibed the antibusiness bias that's pervaded American culture since the Great Depression. We got the message that corporations crushed sensitivity and decency, promoting ruthless manipulation with their crude emphasis on the bottom line, but we never probed too deeply into how, exactly, our parents provided for the pleasant circumstances of our lives. In retrospect, it's amazing that neither my dad nor my uncles nor any of the business-oriented friends of the family ever bothered to correct our puerile assumptions about the corruptions of capitalism. Perhaps they dismissed some of the prevailing ideas as too stupid, too shallow and immature, to merit serious challenge and assumed we would eventually outgrow them as we accumulated practical experience.
As a result, I grew up, like most of my fellow baby boomers (not to mention the offspring of later generations), with an instinctive acceptance of a series of big lies about American business. This book means to answer those distortions with the sort of rebuttals seldom encountered in schools, pop culture, or news media. The economic crisis that shook the country in 2008-2009 makes these responses all the more urgent. The financial reverses afflicting the United States (and all other major economies) encourage the public to believe the worst about our business system and even to expect its imminent demise.
DISMISSING AND DISTRUSTING THE PROFIT MOTIVE
While hard times unquestionably intensify popular suspicions about the values and practices of corporate America, the widespread skepticism toward the market economy began long before the current downturn. Ever since FDR's New Deal of the 1930s, and perhaps since the Progressive Era of thirty years before, the public has expressed queasiness and uncertainty regarding the profit motive. In most quarters of our society there's no shame in possessing money (or the flashy signifiers of wealth and luxury) but there is an odd discomfort in admitting the means by which those resources were acquired. We all benefit from the unparalleled and prodigious productivity of the capitalist system but we feel reluctant to accept the vigorous pursuit of profit at its very core.
Recent surveys, for instance, display startling levels of contempt for leaders of business, reflecting the assumption that entrepreneurs and executives count as sleazy, greedy, selfish, and unreliable. In February 2009, a Harris Interactive poll asked 1,050 respondents if "people on Wall Street" were "as honest and moral as other people"; a stunning 70 percent said "no." In November 2008, an annual Gallup poll evaluated the "Honesty and Ethics of Professions." The category "business executives" ranked near the bottom, even below such frequently reviled occupations as "Lawyers," "Labor Union Leaders," "Funeral Directors," and "Real Estate Agents." (The businessmen beat out only "Congressmen," "Car Salesmen," "Telemarketers," "Advertising Practitioners," and, at the very bottom of the barrel, "Lobbyists.")
In a similar survey of "America's Most Admired Professions" for the Harris organization, the designation "Business Executive" fared even worse. The bulk of 1,020 respondents felt that these capitalist commanders deserved "hardly any prestige at all," ranking them 21st out of 23 categories-barely outpolling only "Stock Broker" and "Real Estate Agent." The most prestigious professions, in order, were "Firefighter," "Doctor," "Nurse," "Scientist," "Teacher," "Military Officer," "Police Officer," "Clergyman," "Farmer," and "Engineer." As Forbes magazine aptly observed, "None of top-ten most admired jobs can be accurately described as being driven by the profit motive-quite a contradiction in a country that was built on it. The A-list is comprised of those who serve others, including engineers (they build things) and farmers (who 'feed the world')."
Surprisingly, this survey appeared in the summer of 2006, well before the financial meltdown of September 2008 provoked a fresh tidal wave of stories about corporate malfeasance and the collapse of capitalism. For a major segment of the public and, perhaps, for a majority, attitudes toward the business community have remained overwhelmingly negative, regardless of the ups and downs of the stock market or the unemployment rate. Most frequently, this antagonism begins in childhood, with school curricula that downplay the prominent participation of corporations, free enterprise, and the accumulation of wealth in the development of the United States.
CENSORING AND SLANTING THE AMERICAN STORY
Even the most cursory examination of elementary and middle school textbooks reveals the present tendency to distort or ignore the role of business in building the country. Consider the national holidays celebrated in the course of an academic year.
*For Thanksgiving, kids learn all about the idealistic Pilgrims and their interaction with the Indians, but hear nothing about their obsessive concern to make their colony profitable or their sponsorship by a for-profit corporation back in England, the London Company.
*Elementary school students prepare for Presidents' Day by studying Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, and Washington, the military hero and Father of Our Country, but they spend no time acknowledging the deep business involvements of both men. Lincoln became prosperous and prominent (by the provincial standards of Springfield, Illinois) by pursuing a career as a corporate lawyer, specializing in representing railroads and other dynamic enterprises. Washington, meanwhile, became one of the richest plantation owners in the colonies through his land investments and the canny management of the resources he acquired after marriage to the wealthy widow Martha. In contrast to his careless Virginia colleague, Thomas Jefferson, he cared deeply about his financial status and avoided debt and money-losing ventures.
*In anticipation of the fireworks of the Fourth of July, most kids get some exposure to the revolutionary slogan "No taxation without representation," but they never connect it to the fact that nearly all our Founders were entrepreneurial merchants and farmers ready to risk their lives to prevent undue governmental interference in their business affairs.
*Finally, we focus on the nation's military history on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, but we seldom acknowledge that the country's greatest military victories owe as much to our economic power and prosperity as to our soldiers' battlefield courage. The Union forces prevailed in the War Between the States because the industrial might of the North easily outproduced the Confederacy. In World War I, America rescued our struggling British and French allies as much with financial support as with a massive expeditionary force, and twenty- seven years later the unprecedented manufacture of planes, warships, tanks, landing craft, and, ultimately, atom bombs played an utterly decisive part in crushing the Germans and the Japanese. In the forty- five-year struggle against Communism in the Cold War, Americans shed blood in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, but finally prevailed because of the vastly superior productivity and prosperity of our economic system.
When social studies classes review stories about American heroes, they naturally feature inspiring tales about the civil rights activism of Martin Luther King, of the pioneering feminism of suffragists like Susan B. Anthony, or the fierce resistance of Indian warriors like Tecumseh or Sitting Bull. Students may even learn of the amazing contributions of "inventor" Thomas Edison, but they'll hear nothing about the time and energy he invested in building major corporations to make sure he enjoyed the monetary rewards of his technological breakthroughs, and vanquished his competitors. Despite media fascination with the current corporate titans like Donald Trump and Bill Gates, no business leader of the past occupies a place on the A- list in the American pantheon. If youngsters hear anything at all about the builders and bosses (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and many more) who made the nation the world's dominant power, they are most likely to concentrate on sneering accounts of their exploitations and predations as "robber barons."
"A TIME BOMB UNDER AMERICAN CAPITALISM"
Literature classes also contribute to the prevailing cynicism about industrialists, entrepreneurs, and financiers; the further students progress in their educations, the greater the chance that they'll learn contempt for business. At the most basic level, commercial success in a market economy stems from the simple expedient of selling a product or service for more than it costs to provide it, just as the steady accumulation of wealth requires nothing more than keeping your expenditures somewhere below your income. These practical imperatives inevitably conflict with the unfocused flightiness of adolescence, so that adolescents (of all ages) contend that the endless repetition of such hardheaded transactions will necessarily deaden the spirit and paralyze the imagination. As young people occupy bedrooms at home or bunk comfortably at college dorms, enjoying the worthy pursuit of educational progress (and weekend partying) financed by their parents' generosity, it's easy to embrace the romantic spirit of the cherished 1806 lyric by William Wordsworth:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
A defender of the market system might point out that the orderly and disciplined process of "getting and spending" is more likely to enhance rather than "lay waste" our powers, but the characterization of business toil as a desensitizing, soul-killing process has kept its hold on artists and intellectuals for more than two centuries.
Unfortunately, most Americans encounter the classics in their English classes several years prior to racking up any meaningful firsthand experience in the world of work, so they're conditioned to expect the worst from the business system before they even enter it. Few citizens will escape from the educational system without encountering Arthur Miller's tragic victim of the American dream, the downtrodden plugger Willy Loman (Low-Man, get it?) from his 1949 classic, Death of a Salesman. In the "Student Companion to Arthur Miller," Susan C. W. Abbotson writes, "Since his college days, Miller had felt that America was being run by men of business who were all after private profit, and who merely used those without wealth as pawns. Thus, it made sense to see money and finance as being behind many American conflicts. Howard Wagner, in 'Death of a Salesman', is the epitome of the cold- hearted businessman, who callously takes away Willy ...
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