The Good, The Bad and The Greedy

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Capitalism — once a great engine of human progress — has lost its moral compass, lost public trust and is urgently in need of repair. This has become a familiar refrain since the global economic downturn and has worsened through the pandemic.

The young of today tend to regard wealth and its creation as alien to the society in which they wish to live, rather than essential to its well-being. Yet, they also regard personal debt, through credit cards and consumer loans, as a matter of entitlement, rather than burden, and have lost the frugal habit of saving that helped their parents’ generation build better futures for themselves.

This seminal critique, written from the point of view of a deep admirer of entrepreneurship and private sector investment as a proven path to innovation, social progress and prosperity, argues that businesses always operate in a social context — that a ‘good’ business in a moral sense can also, in a perfect world, be a business that richly rewards its creators and backers — so long as the basic principles are right.

Putting aside the nonsense of corporate virtue signalling, Vander Weyer formulates a number of core principles, separating out ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ in today’s corporate arena — and placing the spotlight fiercely on a third element: ‘the greedy’.