This just in:
Bernard J. Ebbers, the founder and former chief executive of WorldCom, was sentenced to 25 years in prison today for his role in an $11 billion accounting fraud that brought down the telecommunications company in 2002.
This whole sordid affair, which now seems to have ended with some measure of justice, seems custom made to confirm the anti-merchant arguments of just about all of the great thinkers of classical China.
The book that bears the name of Mencius begins with an admonition to avoid profit:
"Don't talk about profit," Mencius said. "It's Humanity and Duty that matter. Emperors say: How can I profit my nation? Lords say: How can I profit my house? And everyone else says: How can I profit myself? Then everyone high and low is scrambling for profit, pitching the nation into grave danger.
We do not tend to think that corporate fraud actually undermines the nation, but for Confucians the selfish rush for material self-interest is a powerful corrosive of social bonds and affections. Confucius himself was famously wary of merchants and profiteering:
The Master said: "If there were an honorable way to get rich, I'd do it, even if it meant being a stooge standing around with a whip. But there is not an honorable way, so I just do what I like."
The stooge image might fit Ebbers quite well, especially when his pathetic defense is considered:
They [Ebber's lawyers] argued that Mr. Ebbers had made no money from the fraud because he had held onto his WorldCom shares even as their value plunged, and they contended that the size of the loss to investors - billions of dollars by all estimates - exaggerated the severity of the fraud itself.
I don't quite get it: the multi-billion size of the loss to investors somehow "exaggerated" the severity of the fraud. Perhaps they are trying to say that the actions themselves were small, just the outcome in dollars was big. Are they suggesting that the money just doesn't matter in some way? Then why did he commit the fraud in the first place, if not to pocket the big, big dollars himself. Just pathetic.
And it is not just Confucian moralists who would call this what it truly is - greedy self-promotion at the expense of others. Our old friend Han Fei Tzu also distrusted businessmen. He says, in a "disordered" country:
Its merchants and artisans spend their time making articles of no practical use and gathering stores of luxury goods, accumulating riches, waiting for the best time to sell, and exploiting the farmers.
But I guess the question that comes from all this is: can we really escape this kind of extreme greed in a global economy that is swept up in competitive advantage and growth at seemingly any cost? Are the warnings of the Confucians and Legalists (and we could certainly throw the Taoists in here, too) simply anachronistic in today's America and China, where Humanity and Duty are swamped by conspicuous consumption? Or, is there some ray of hope in the fact that Ebbers is, in fact, going to jail for 25 years?
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