The Business Ethics Journal Review

An interesting example there.

If you’re a free market CEO, I suppose you’d say: “Overpriced? What is that? The price of my stock is what people are willing to pay for it. If it is X today, how can I claim to know it should really be Y? On what basis would I ever say such a thing?”

But…if you’re a participant in a mixed economy who understands free market theory, then the problem really does come up all the time.

I know a couple guys who run a biotech startup, and the profitability of their business seems to depend heavily, perhaps entirely, on subsidized green energy nonsense. To them, to their investors, to their employees, to their (gag) stakeholders, everything seems to be going beautifully. To me, it looks like they’ve built a really expensive mansion on a precipice of political risk, because I can see their business is not founded on any source of legitimate, subjective value demand. The next time a stationary bandit needs to slake his teacher’s union more than he needs to pretend he cares about mother earth, it’s game over.

This problem is certainly not limited to CEOs or entrepreneurs. One might ask a similar question of everyone who blogs here:

When one of our hosts looks upon a room full of students, they have to know they’re dealing with a bunch of kids who would never, and could never have bought the product they’re selling at anything resembling a market price. Many, too many of those students will go immediately from the college experience into a depressing period of buyer’s remorse, during which only the fond memory of casual sex, two-hour work days, and consequence-free binge drinking will prevent them from resenting the schools which profited so securely at their expense. (Note: That’s gotta be the real reason why all those Occupy kids blamed the banks who lent the tuition, instead of the universities who collected it. The school at least allowed them to have a good time, while the bank is now rudely insisting they pay for it.)

But it’s not just about money, it’s also about false promises of meaning in life. The big lie of the education racket these days isn’t “you can all get rich”, it’s “you can all have jobs that aren’t boring.” And it really doesn’t matter if, in between cashing checks, a professor makes an effort to warn his students about how scarce those jobs really are. That can’t even begin to mitigate the damage done by the false signal sent whenever we read something like “Cornfield State Agricultural College is proud to announce that it is now offering a Doctor of Philosophy…”

Forget payday lending and CEOs with overvalued stock options. Let’s hear about a real moral dilemma, like…what sort of ruthless adventurer must you be to teach college these days?