Things seem to be very slow today on the LBO list, so I thought I'd do something self-indulgent and post an excerpt from the 25th reunion alumni notes submission I sent to fellow Brown U. Class of '72 classmates last year:
"Extended association with the business world has not enhanced my appreciation of the free enterprise system. What appalls me particularly, of course, is the way our CEO (ahem) elite has seized on the end of the cold war as good reason to enrich itself at the expense of everyone else. What appalls me even more is that this development seems perfectly fine with most 'everyone else' so long as those at the bottom of the social heap get the worst of it....
"However, pace Francis Fukuyama, I suspect we're passing through the shortest 'end of history' in history. Capitalism is often faulted for having no heart, but in practical terms its greatest vulnerability is that it has no brain. Thanks to the strenuous efforts of Reaganauts, Thatcherites et al., Anglo-American society -- certainly the leading source of market idolatry worldwide -- has done a remarkably thorough job trashing social safeguards that, once upon a time, saved not just the downtrodden but the system itself. Beyond that, these protean 'conservatives' have been just as effective at stripping the concept of taxation of its legitimacy -- helping to assure that public education, basic research and other nondiscretionary national pursuits will be increasingly starved of funding as we careen onwards into the Darwinian global economy.
"In short, call me naive, a nattering nabob of negativism, whatever -- I persist in believing that a system that, by its own frequent admission, is powered solely by fear and greed is a system that forever will tend to bring out the worst in people and act against its own basic self-interests.
"Finally, I'd like to quote one of my heroes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, to close on a note that's both oracular and -- since Emerson once said, 'I hate quotations' -- suitably ornery. 'The world lies in night of sin,' Emerson wrote in 1838. 'It hears not the cock crowing: it sees not the grey streak in the East. At the first entering ray of light, society is shaken with fear and anger from side to side. Who opened that shutter? they cry, Wo to him! They belie it, they call it darkness that comes in, affirming that they were in light before.... The sects, the colleges, the church, the statesmen all have forebodings. It now works only in a handful. What does State Street and Wall Street and the Royal Exchange and the Bourse at Paris care for these few thoughts and these few men? Very little; truly; most truly. But the doom of State Street, and Wall Street, of London, and France, of the whole world, is advertised by those thoughts; is in the procession of the Soul which comes after those few thoughts.'"
A little transcendentalism on a quiet summer afternoon.
Carl Remick