You mean Rather nails it again !This media Icon has been taken off the air because he is more inteersted in the truth than in the corporate, profit motive.
If business was ethical, the truth and the corporate profit motive would be one and the same. well said. I would add, however, that there have been numerous points in history where business has been generally ethical. if you look at the pre-revolutionary colonial days in america you'll see an example of this. the colonies were completely self-sustained and happy, because ethical business practices were a part of the culture; the abundance that ethical business practices produced made the practice popular until the british crown outlawed colonial scrip. within a year after that, the colonies experienced mass unemployment and economic depression, and that, according to ben franklin in his autobiography, was the sole cause of the revolutionary war, not taxes. taxes were just the fuse. outlawing colonial scrip was the keg of powder...
then you have britain, after king henry I of england outlawed gold coins, and introduced the tally stick around 1100. there was a period of 750 years (until the tally stick itself was outlawed by the newly, privately owned Bank of England in 1854) where english businessmen basically invented business ethics. these people would take it to extremes. for example, if there were four candle shops on one street, and one of them was having trouble with business, the other three would actually shut down until the owner with troubles got back on his feet.
of course, english society was also very class-oriented, and the rich always trampled on the poor, but the same business ethics that existed between rich men existed between serfs and between the small, free middle class that england had.
sorry to go off on a tangent, but I find that subject fascinating...
