Creating Capital: Money-making as an aim in businessLipman, Frederick L. (Frederic Lockwood)
Philosophy
Creating Capital: Money-making as an aim in business
Lipman, Frederick L. (Frederic Lockwood)
Business; Saving and investment; Wealth -- Moral and ethical aspects
The creation of capital we cannot fail to recognize as a worthy aim. It
has given mankind much of all that mankind possesses and constitutes
the foundation upon which civilization largely rests. The advancement
in the arts and sciences has been in no small degree stimulated by the
demands of business enterprise for new methods of creating capital and
we may believe that should the time arrive when this motive should
fail, when men should grow to be indifferent in their attitude towards
profits, the ensuing stagnation would affect every department of human
endeavor. Of this we may be assured even when we remember that
money-making, and what goes with it, is not the only aim in life.
After cataloguing so much that is virtuous in the pursuit of
money-making the suggestion is inevitable that there must be some other
side to it, that the common views of the rapacity of the money-maker
cannot be wholly unfounded. What then are the vices of the money-making
aim? In examining this question we shall first brush aside some things
to which we have already referred. The pathological cases of mere
crime, of sharp practice, of taking advantage of others, while mounting
up into distressingly high figures considered absolutely, are much less
important relatively; that is, they are infrequent and scarce enough to
avoid obscuring the rule which they violate, the rule that honesty is
indispensable in economics as well as in ethics. What we must now
investigate is any vicious tendencies that may be found in the
money-making aim when followed normally and according to its own
accepted principles. Of such degenerative tendencies we seem to find
two: first, the tendency to that excess which becomes a vice; and
second, the tendency to a disregard of other considerations in life
through too exclusive a devotion to acquisitiveness. But upon further
thought we must see that these two tendencies flow together and become
one, for too much devotion to money-getting and too little attention to
the other purposes of life are, after all, expressions of the same
thing. Perhaps a man may err in excessive devotion to any object of
life but we must admit that in the pursuit of gain the evil tendency to
exaggerated absorption in the one aim is promoted through a coöperation
with his natural selfishness. Of all the fields of human endeavor, here
is one that peculiarly fits in with self-seeking, with disregard for
others, which may drag a man downward, making him small and mean,
unhappy and uncharitable, while apparently attaining the goal at which
he has aimed. Not every man, while concentrating upon money-making, is
consciously seeking his country's welfare, the amelioration of life for
the many, the uplift of posterity, even if he rigidly adheres to the
accepted rules of the game, to the code of business honor. This brings
us back to the popular picture of the money-maker, grasping, sordid,
narrow-minded. There are such people. I believe them to be rare, but
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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