August 15, 2009
FDR on social values vs. profit
As Franklin Roosevelt put it in his first inaugural address:
"The moneychangers have fled from their high seats
in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore
that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of
the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply
social values more noble than mere monetary profit."
If our own progressives could merely be as left as our former President once was, we might solve the urgent problems of the day. Unfortunately, today's progressive movement is composed of single issue movements that fail to peel the onion to the center and find the common core that links all of their issues to a single cause.
So long as competition is at the heart of most of the world's economic systems, and so long as profit is the measure of whether one survives within that competition, then such niceties as pollution, extinction, global warming, energy depletion, maintenance of biospheres, over-fishing, and wars for natural resources and markets, cannot be averted. For every economic entity, it is fight or die, whatever the consequences for the future. For if Exxon grows an environmental conscience, then the only result will be its acquisition by those energy companies which failed to grow one.
Posted by doctormatt at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)