TOS Blog: Daily Commentary from an Objectivist Perspective

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Mitch Daniels: Business is “One of the Noblest of Human Pursuits”

Posted by Joshua Lipana at 2:58 pm

Indiana_Governor_Mitch_DanielsIn the GOP’s response speech to President Obama’s State of the Union, Mitch Daniels said, “Contrary to the president’s constant disparagement of people in business, it’s one of the noblest of human pursuits.”

Though Daniels’ speech is a mixed bag, his identification of the nobility of business is spot on and is a refreshing contrast to Obama’s anti-business agenda. Businessmen are productive dynamos who trade value for value to earn their wealth. Steve Jobs, John Allison, Bill Gates, Jonathan Hoenig, and other businessmen deserve to be praised for pursuing their rational self-interest and for creating goods and services that further their lives and, consequently, the lives of those who trade with them.

Republican leaders desperately need to recognize and embrace the moral nature of business. And they need to work to protect the individual rights of businessmen and unshackle producers from regulations and discriminatory taxation.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Posted in: Business and Economics, Individual Rights and Law, Philosophy

Comments are welcome so long as they are civil.
  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000050229377 Garret Seinen

    Too few people appreciate that a scientist will unravel the secrets of nature, an engineer will build a machine utilizing those discoveries, it is not until a businessman enters the picture that a device reaches the market.  Until a businessman puts together a factory to mass produce a device that uses the application cheaply, it is just an intellectual exercise.

  • https://me.yahoo.com/a/ffXz3Fcmq.XFH_Yl__T2G9rL1aU3#8a634 Mike Kevitt

    True.  But, what’s a businessman to do without scientists, engineers, etc., including “workers” (they all work), even “unskilled” (they’re all skilled, even the so-called unskilled)?  Without those people’s intellectual exercises in the lab and allegedly unthinking physical motions in the mines, shop floors, etc., the businessman’s talents remain latent and he can only dream, unless HE does all that intellectual and physical work himself.  NONE of these people can do anything but dream without each other, or try using force on each other, OR approach each other as possible markets (demand) for their supply, who will then supply their demand, and vice versa.  They’re all essential for value to any of them.

    As for the “unskilled”, in this regard, it’s my position that their “mere” physical motions have always had a productive,  economic, and MARKETABLE value not yet recognized by anybody, including them.  In the 19th. century they had the brains to identify that value and to figure out how to market it, possibly in union with each other, to the effect of becomming “middle class”. 

    Instead, they became “unionized” by a bunch of crooks with no more brains than they, who saw that the gvt. could be infested, and who figured out how, as was done (and is) in other areas.  Workers got unionized instead of marketing their value simply (conceptually) because of their, the crooks, and everybody’s implicit philosophy, the prevailing implicit cultural philosophy.  So their and everybody else’s, including businessmen’s, thinking was conducive to this perversion.  They thought in perversions as per perverted philosophy, like everybody else, to this moment.

    So, what’s their marketable value?  I’ll just say, now, that they’re just as indispensible as everybody else; they exert themselves; their jobs drain them; after a long day ( and a 6 or 7 day week) they go home tired and worn out, so others can do other things.  They can’t do what smarter people can do; smarter people won’t do what they do, and smarter people CAN’T, not economically, at least, any more than they can do what smarter people do.

    Everybody’s value is only potential, nothing but dreams and aimless motion, zero, without everybody’s input, by the market.  With the market, there’s value.  It’s the market of a worker as much as of anybody else.  If they act like it, they’ll start getting the value from their work that they seek, by the market, instead of by crime under cover of the guise of law and gvt. and a pseudo-market.