Man. After that last post, I need it.

Reason Online has posted a fascinating dialogue between a few noted free-market types. John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, argues that corporate responsibility must include more than simple monetary profit. Milton Friedman, the god of free markets, responds as does another CEO.

I’m a businessman and a free market libertarian, but I believe that the enlightened corporation should try to create value for all of its constituencies. From an investor’s perspective, the purpose of the business is to maximize profits. But that’s not the purpose for other stakeholders—for customers, employees, suppliers, and the community. Each of those groups will define the purpose of the business in terms of its own needs and desires, and each perspective is valid and legitimate.

Mackey's point is an interesting one, and I have to admit that I'd never considered that someone from a libertarian perspective would articulate it in such a way. The idea of focusing not just on shareholders but on stakeholders in the company is a fascinating one. Another angle of discussion the nature of the investor relationship.

I believe {corporate charity programs} would be completely justifiable even if they produced no profits and no P.R. This is because I believe the entrepreneurs, not the current investors in a company’s stock, have the right and responsibility to define the purpose of the company.... It is the entrepreneurs who set the company strategy and who negotiate the terms of trade with all of the voluntarily cooperating stakeholders—including the investors.

Friedman responds, getting in jabs at the nature of charity, but essentially spends his column-inches trying to explain Mackey's views as enlightened self-intrest disguised as altruism. In that sense, says Friedman, their differences are largely rhetorical.

It's TJ Rogers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, whose response borders on charicature.

I balk at the proposition that a company’s “stakeholders” (a term often used by collectivists to justify unreasonable demands) should be allowed to control the property of the shareholders. It seems Mackey’s philosophy is more accurately described by Karl Marx.

Shouting 'Marx!' feels like the economic equivalent of Godwinizing a discussion like this. I'm reminded of how barren our collective vocabulary is when we talk about issues like this. We've taken Adam Smith and turned his observations about markets into a moral force -- but who says that all of society must operate like a market at all times? As reasoning creatures, we're perfectly capable of shaping new norms. Self-interest is a powerful motivator, but it has never been and never will be the only motivator.

Rogers also asks, rhetorically, why Mackey feels giving to charity is better than giving to investors. Investors, after all, are individuals too -- they'll donate profits to charity, use them to put children through college, use them to fund a retirement... And Mackey is stealing from them to fund his philanthropy! Scandalous! Rogers sets the trap, then walks into it. Having spent his five paragraphs saying that profit is a corporation's sole purpose and responsibility, he sugar-coats his statement by implying that investors are themselves a sort of charity. As Machey notes in his rebuttal, investors can choose to put their money in a corporation whose goal is pure profit, or to put their money in one whose goals are broader.

Mackey's writing comes across as mature and thoughtful, framing the debate in terms of human issues. Friedman, for all his influence, seems genuinely blind to the idea that there is a world beyond the spreadsheet. And Rogers just looks like a Wall Street cartoon -- the "Greed Is Good" rationalizer. He's not a bad person from the sound of it, but I've always been baffled by the genuine anger and venom that many free-market types seem to reserve for people who act on moral principles inside the market system.

Things in Iraq are bad. Things in New Orleans and Texas are bad. There are hot spots, terrorists, and negotiations in progress to determine who'll be holding fissionable material in ten years.

It's easy to forget, though, that only a couple decades ago, the entire planet was poised on the brink of genuine large-scale superpowers-duking-it-out nuclear war. In fact, On September 26th, 1983, one man's instincts and some lucky guesses were literally all that prevented WWIII from kicking off.

Staniaslav Petrov, a Russian Army Colonel at the time, was on watch when the alert sounded, indicating that American nuclear missile launches had been detected and warheads were inbound towards the USSR. The next day, it would be discovered that faulty software had mistaken sunrise reflections for launches and the alarm was a mistake, but at the moment it was all klaxxons and impending doom for Stan.

With the KGB breathing down his back and the fate of the world on the line, Stan went with his gut and decided that it was a false alarm. He was "extensively interviewed" by the KGB afterwards, but was never punished -- now, he lives in a small village, secure in the knowledge that his instincts saved a good chunk of civilization.

We salute you, Stan. Thanks! (Also, thanks to squorch and MetaFilter for the links.)

A year before I was born, zoologist Richard Dawkins coined the term Meme. At the time, it was novel. He proposed that ideas or behaviors, like genes, were subject to natural selection and could respond to the same environmental pressures and influences that biological units do. He defined a meme as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." That's a pretty abstract definition, but it's grown a lot since the 70s. People have even tried to consciously engineer memes to combat other memes they perceived as dangerous or damaging.

Now, almost everything from religions to web links to livejournal polls gets called a meme. If you're trying to put together a one-size-fits-all explanation of human cognition -- or just come up with an easy way to dismiss your opponent's ideas as brainwashed delusions -- memetics looks like a very nice hammer and other peoples' ideas look very much like nails. The idea that any thought they have, any belief, any argument, any practice, is just the behavioral equivalent of natural selection leads to a certain smug certainty. "Well, sure, you believe that cows are sacred -- that's because eating them would be unsustainable in your region, thus the sacred-cow meme evolved and survived..." And so on and so on.

The idea of 'memes' is in and of itself a meme, of course, making for a nice snake-eats-its-tail sort of rhetorical scenario. It can be used to critique any idea but it seems to me that practitioners rarely look that deeply. Dawkins' original formulation ("memes" as units of cultural transmission or imitation) is broad enough that it really just provides a convenient handle for something slippery. Religions are, in fact, big collections of memes. so is science, so is grammar, so are things like "consciousness" and "natural selection" itself.

Not everyone abuses the 'meme' meme in the way I've seen above, but it seems to be growing and generating a backlash. Like trendy hipsters who see their favorite band's influence everywhere, hardcore memetics people tend to see everything through that particular lens.

It's useful, this 'meme' concept, but can abuse of it be stopped? Maybe every useful idea has to go through a phase like this.

Moral High Ground
If you start bitching about it, you don't have it. Period. End of story. If you think you have it and the rest of the world disagrees, it's not their problem -- it's your problem. When you get old and die and go to Heaven, you'll get jewels in your crown for doing the right thing even if everyone on Earth said bad things about you. Just remember, though, that it cuts both ways. Just because you can find ((population / 2) + 1) people to agree with you doesn't mean God does.

The (insert group of choice) Agenda
Gay. Radical Right. Socialist. Secularist. American Taliban. Fundie. Liberal. Whatever, people. Every group has an agenda, and capitalizing it doesn't make it any more ominous. There are three questions I care about when someone gets frothy about So-And-So-Group's Agenda. First, does the group actually exist as an entity or is it just a convenient stereotype? Second, is the summary of the aforementioned agenda accurate, or does it grossly misrepresent the group's goals and vision for cheap rhetorical points? Third, to what extent do I believe this agenda is beneficial or dangerous? If you can't deal with those questions clearly and honestly and calmly, go away.

Culture Of (random noun)
You don't know what it means, and you haven't bothered to tell anyone else, either. Suck it up and learn to communicate without your bumper stickers, kids. If what you really mean is "A world where a majority agrees with me," go back to writing Left Behind fanfic.

Theocracy
Yes, there are a lot of people out there who believe in God and think that The Bible is God's word. A large chunk of them believe that God's ideas are good ones. You may disagree with them, and you may find them inexplicably goofy, even insane. This does not mean that they desire a theocracy. Look the word up. Think about it for a moment. A religious person being elected to high office does not make the country a theocracy, any more than a woman being elected President makes American culture matriarchal.

Aiding and Abetting
This phrase, specifically as applied to terrorism and "The War On Terror," has been broadened by rhetoric to the point that it's meaningless. Opinions are not treason. Expressing opinions is not treason. Vocally disagreeing with the actions of the US government is not treason. Even vocally disagreeing with the US government in ways that our military enemies might enjoy hearing is not treason. This line of reasoning gives us the national equivalent of the dumb boss who demands that people support his asinine office polices because "conflict hurts the company."

Everyone's dishonest.
A craven, cowardly cop-out by those who can't defend the actions of those they hold up as heroes. Trusting a leader you've never know and never met because of their character and then brushing off their public misdeeds as "what everyone else does" is pathetic. If you think (insert random misdeed) doesn't matter as much as other peoples', then explain WHY instead of pretending you're a cynic.

Because (group) Hates (value)
Terrorists hate freedom. Christians hate knowledge. Gays hate God. Atheists hate marriage. Liberals hate America. Conservatives hate the poor. Pro-choicers hate babies. Pro-lifers hate women. This generic statement is a frothy blend of straw-man and false-dichotomy, misrepresenting the real motivations of the group in question. It also pressures the listener to jump to the defense of whatever mom-flag-and-apple-pie value is supposedly under attack without considering the real motivations and concerns of the group in question. It's for the children!

Thanks to Substitute for finding this story before I did. It reduced both of us to baffled, boggling silence.

For centuries, the argument in favor of laissez-faire capitalism has been simple. If you step back and let businesses pursue profit without restraint, legitimate needs and desires will be taken care of in an efficient manner. Moral concerns, the argument went, were better handled by consumers voting with dollars than governments coercing with legislation.

While I have my issues with that presupposition (see earlier posts about The Miracle Of The Market and the language of economics), it has given rise to some innovative approaches to social activism. The Social Investment Forum, SocialFunds.com, and other similar projects play by the rules of the free market, investing money in corporations that don't abuse the environment or exploit their workers. In that way, they're putting a dollar value -- their own money -- on those positive business practices.

Sounds cool, right? Putting moral value into The Market as something with economic weight? Bzzzzzt. According to Steven Milloy, a FoxNews and New York Sun columnist, they're bad people trying to weaken businesses. In order to combat those nasty, nasty investors who let moral responsibility get in the way of stock returns, he's founding a new mutual fund to counter Socially Responsible Investing.

Conrad posted a choice quote from the Wall Street Journal's article:

Founded by Steven Milloy, a columnist for FoxNews.com and The New York Sun, the fund aims to get good returns for investors while - in his words - evening the score with leftist forces that are chipping away at business. Culprits include corporate management, mutual funds and other groups that promote so-called corporate social responsibility.

"Businesses are being pressured by radical politicized left-wing activists to do things not in the best interest of the whole free-enterprise system," said Milloy, also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and publisher of junkscience.com, a commentary site that bears the motto: "All the junk that's fit to debunk." "We want to be a counterforce to the activists," Milloy added.

So, let's revisit. When people decide what to invest in based on moral principle, they're bad. Because if a corporation is doing something legal to make a profit, that's good. But if people try to change laws to keep corporations from doing things they think are wrong, that's bad. Because if people really thought the things were bad, they would vote with their dollars. But if they vote with their dollars, that's bad. So, to stop them, Milloy and his friends will invest in companies that do bad things. And that's good.

Got it.

Catherine and I have been talking over the last week or two about the difficulty of discussing moral and ethical choices in our society when the discussion takes place in the language of economics. Free market capitalism is a well-oiled machine at this point, churning along and refining itself with little concern for troublesome bits like ethics or humanity or long-term viability.

Economics is a strange, magickal science to begin with. At certain levels, it's about describing the interactions between different parties and how they exchange valued things, like work and gold and time and DVD players. On a large scale, trying to predict how a nation's economy will go depends on very abstract philosophical models. Figuring out what to do to change and shape that direction is even trickier. In many cases, even deciding what we're measuring to determine success or failure is debatable. The only true anchor point of economics is this: Having More Is Good, Having Less Is Bad.

There are lots of ways to extrapolate this into what appears to be an equitable ethical and moral framework. In a large group of people, for example, one might decide that the median valuation of personal net worth is the measure of societal success. Or, perhaps the frequency with which people on the bottom of the net-worth pile advance to higher net-worth tiers. Or perhaps the percentage of people whose net worth is below a certain 'acceptable' level. If that number shrinks, we can declare victory.

These valuations, though, still collapse the human experience to a purely economic one. This isn't shocking -- economics is a language, a set of tools, and it doesn't include the meta-tools to describe the world outside of itself. You can't describe a work of art in economic terms -- only what people are willing to pay for it. You can't describe a child in economic terms -- only the cost of raising it, its potential productivity, and so on. There's nothing wrong with that; theology, for example, doesn't include very useful tools for analyzing the repercussions of international trade agreements. But increasingly, because economics seems very objective and rational, our society turns to its language, its constructs, to resolve inherently moral and ethical problems.

The concept of "The Market" is an example. Libertarians especially are fond of talking about The Market as if it is Providence, a force that works all events to good, even if we can't yet see it.

The International Herald Tribune has an interesting (if depressing) article today that highlights the problem. While the main focus of the piece is on Administration restrictions on African AIDS programs, there's a nugget that highlights the moral neutrality of The Market.

Here in Livingstone, Zambia, I visited Corridors of Hope, a U.S.-financed center for young people that has proved cheap and effective in reducing HIV among prostitutes and long-distance truck drivers. One prostitute in the program is Mavis Sitwala, an orphan (probably because of AIDS) who is supporting her five siblings and one child. She says that truck drivers pay $1 for sex with a condom or $4 for sex without.

"At times, you need food or money to pay the rent," she said, "and so even if he won't use a condom, you agree."

In the language of The Market, Mavis Sitwala is simply a free actor willing to do certain things in exchange for monetary compensation. Those who risk more receive more -- The Market has put a certain value on sex, both protected and unprotected, and that's just the way it is. The question of whether what she's doing is right (or what the truckers who hire her are doing right) can't really be considered. The only reason to intervene is if, say, Mavis' actions cause a ripple effect of economically detrimental health care problems.

Terri Schiavo's case recently highlighted the issue. A Christian acquaintance of mine said that we should work to build a Culture Of Life, to prevent anyone from being taken off life support. I pointed out that this would take metric tons of money -- Terri Schiavo is alive as I write this entry only because her husband won a malpractice lawsuit against her doctors and secured more than half a million dollars for her medical care. In low-profile cases, where low income families have no money to pay for the care of an infant or elderly loved one, are we as a society willing to foot the bill? The Market won't take care of that one -- it's brutal in its efficiency, as any study of insurance industry practices will show.

Are we as a culture willing to make decisions that are 'economically bad' but 'morally right?'