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As appeasement and pursuit of ‘social license’ is futile, other oil and pipeline executives should follow Girling’s example and defend their companies on moral grounds for the great value they provide. Governments, for their part, should cease their welfare-destroying climate change policies and focus on protecting individual rights instead.
Every day, businesses make the world a better place to live, profitably, by creating and trading material values, by mutual consent and for mutual benefit. It’s time we’d recognize it and appreciate business people for what they do. Such a cultural change would, in time, create business heroes also in Hollywood movies and spiritual fuel for all of us.
An important aspect of the freedom to exercise reason is the freedom of speech: the liberty to express opinions and to persuade others, whether to advertise one’s products, to raise capital, to contract suppliers, or to recruit employees. Taking this freedom away also severely undermines companies’ ability to create material values.
Is the premise that catastrophic man-made climate change is happening and that corporations, particularly those involved in producing fossil fuels, are largely culpable, valid?
British companies can even outperform those outside of the EU—if the British government does not compromise on the principle of liberty. That is the big ‘if.’ But the Brexit has opened up a huge opportunity for a freer, more prosperous Britain.
To the delight of everyone who cares about freedom and human well-being, Exxon did not surrender to Healey’s irrational demand. Instead, it sued AG Healey in a Texas court last week, for violating its constitutional right for free speech
Business is for producing and trading material values, driven by the profit motive.
While it is too late to prevent the damage in Fort McMurray now, the solution to minimizing losses from fires in the future is to sell the government forests and let private owners manage them for long-term profitability—by protecting their own property and respecting the property rights of others (through good property management to reduce the fire hazard).
Individual rights include the freedom to use whichever sources of energy people and businesses want, as long as they don’t violate others’ rights.
In my years of teaching ethics to business students, I must have heard it all when it comes to justifying deception and lying in business.
Those who think that government collecting taxes from those who are productive to give them to those who are not is just, do so because they have accepted the morality of altruism and egalitarianism and believe that statism is the ideal social system.
Whether you believe that acting morally costs or pays depends on your view of morality.
There are just two fundamental requirements of innovation—neither of which requires taxation: reason and freedom.
The egalitarian ideal of minimizing inequality of income and wealth, the nanny state is unjust because it penalizes those who are productive and entrepreneurial to reward those who are not.
Despite the increased use of fossil fuels, toxic pollution has already decreased significantly, and the availability of clean water has increased—thanks to human ingenuity and innovation.
True self-interest cannot involve cynical exploitation of others through initiation of physical force or fraud
To make selfishness, or self-interest, unpalatable and to promote altruism instead, the majority of philosophers misrepresent self-interest as a package-deal.
If the government subsidizes or operates newspapers, the important role of independent investigation and criticism of government actions—and the hope for changing the government—is lost.
A common exhortation heard today is: Set self-interest aside and act for the “common good.” Businesspeople in particular are accused of selfishness and are told (by media commentators, NGOs, and ethicists, among others) to serve the “common good.” This exhortation...
Most people in industrialized countries take the availability of such energy for granted: we turn on a switch, and the power is there, for heating, cooling, lighting, manufacturing, transportation, and for any other human purpose.
The feather in Mr. DiCaprio’s dunce cap is his hypocrisy over fossil fuels — without the energy provided by the fossil fuel companies, the Hollywood film industry could not exist, and DiCaprio could not have had the career and earned wealth he has.
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