A Slogan Is Born!

The following was sent to Navigator by IOS member Lenny Turetsky. Turetsky, 23, was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, and at age 4 moved with his parents to the United States. Last May, he graduated from Yale University with a B.S. in computer science and philosophy. Currently, he lives in San Francisco and works as a software engineer and project manager for a telecommunications startup company in that city.

Turetsky writes: "I was speaking on the phone the other night to a friend who's a graduating senior at the top liberal arts university in Cambridge, Mass. We were discussing his job choices (that is, which management consulting firm to join), and he said he wanted to do something that helped the world. I was touting the value of the work he was considering when he (not an Objectivist) said: 'Oh, you mean like the idea that Milken did more good than Mother Teresa. I'm not sure what I think of that.'

"Apparently, this idea is getting a fair bit of air-time. He couldn't recall whether he first heard about it at Harvard, read it in Business Week, or talked about it at interviews with the management consulting firms. But he said it's been a topic of discussion at school lately.

"So, even if the idea doesn't get popular agreement, it's a big achievement that it's gotten to be so widespread, and in such rarefied circles as the Harvard dorms and the McKinsey final-round interviews."

Kirez Korgan, quite independently of Turetsky, has sent an e-mail message to IOS reporting that the following passages appeared in an article published by the left-wing British newspaper The Guardian. Reporter Victor Keegan began his article by mentioning "naïve people who like to believe there is a connection between effort and reward." He then went on to decry economic inequality and mention that there are actually some people (such as economist Paul Craig Roberts) who are not appalled by the existence of such inequality in a free-market economy. To cap this revelation, he confided: "An American philosopher (David Kelley) even argues that the disgraced junk bond advocate Michael Milken 'was a greater benefactor to mankind than Mother Teresa.' Why? Because he created wealth while she merely redistributed wealth donated by philanthropists."

Is it time to call in the bumper-sticker manufacturers?

David Kelley on the ABC News special "Greed With John Stossel"