The View from Cullingworth: goodness

Andy is a local businessman. Employs about twenty people. Works hard - pretty much non-stop. Pretty typical of his sort. I want to tell you about his sort by way of response to this piece of Marxist bigotry:

...neoliberal bosses have something in common with child molesters. Both lack restraint in the pursuit of their own self-gratification in situations where they think they can get away with it.

I'm not beating up on Chris Dillow here for the crass correlation of businessmen with paedophiles but rather with his perpetuating the myth that the operation of trade - business - is merely a matter of "the maximal pursuit of money".

Andy had an employee who was diagnosed with cancer. It turned out pretty soon that this young man wasn't going to make it and, more to the point, he wouldn't be able to do the job for which Andy employed him. In Chris Dillow's fantasy of the businessman as an exploitative, MaxU, utilitarian, Andy would see the employee onto sick pay and that's end of it. Let me tell you what actually happened.

The dying young man was kept on the payroll - full wages despite not being able to work - right up to the day he died. When Andy discovered he'd no life insurance, he organised a fundraiser to get some cash for his wife and young kids. And he spent the last days of this man's life helping his family deal with what was happening.

There is a common shtick among left-wing (and not-so-left-wing) commenters that trade - doing business - attracts the worst sort of people and is, you know, just a little mucky and common. Wherever we look - film, TV, literature - business people are portrayed as bad people. Yet the reality is that the typical businessman or woman is no better or worse than the typical social worker, academic or Marxist columnist. And this means that, every day, business people act without consideration of maximising profits because they want to do the right thing. It's not just high profile things like paying for a woman's cancer treatment but a whole host of little things made possible because the business people have made some cash - anybody who has worked raising money for something like building a new village hall know just how businesses, large and small, are willing to help out. As 'Secret Millionaire' showed us, the idea of giving back, of helping, of making a place better is as central to business life as deal-making.

The late Barry Pettman, one of the founders of Emerald publishing, ran his other publishing businesses from his home at Patrington in Holderness. To make sure that the village post office kept open, Barry shipped everything to Patrington to go out through this little post office. For sure, Barry (who was born in a Hull council estate and was an academic economist) liked buying very expensive wine and grand cars (plus second and third homes in the USA and NZ), but his urge to make money was matched by his desire to see that money help the community where he lived. And what Barry did is repeated again and again across the world, business people are not soul-less Randian automata motivated solely by maximising utility but flesh and blood people with strong personal ethics, courage, faith and love. It's time we recognised this and put an end to the narrow "bosses are bad" perspective of people like Chris Dillow.

...

Marco, who owns around 150 properties internationally, including six in Preston, said he is willing to give extra support to the winning candidate as well as the keys to the top-floor flat, including footing the council tax bill for as long as necessary.

Read more at: https://www.lep.co.uk/news/millionaire-businessman-is-giving-away-a-flat-in-preston-for-free-1-8358210

The View from Cullingworth

Sunday, 18 February 2018

Not only is business good for society but so are bosses.