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Fortune Small Business "review" occasioned by a viewing of The Call of the Entrepreneur

Friday, December 21, 2007

Malika Worrell’s review of The Call of the Entrepreneur is a perfect storm of distorting prejudice, muddle, and simple factual errors. First, she says, “Much of Call’s 58-minute runtime is taken up with talking heads, most of whom are affiliated with the Acton Institute, affirming the film’s ideology that unfettered capitalism is inherently righteous.”

This is incorrect, and I told her it was incorrect in our interview. The majority of interviewees in the film, from Brad Morgan to George Gilder, Michael Novak, Jimmy Lai, and Peter Boettke, are not affiliated with Acton. Moreover, her description of the film’s “ideology” (why not say “argument”?) seems to be describing some other film. What little was said about the free market and capitalism in our film focused on the importance not of “unfettered capitalism” but of private property and rule of law. Such government-enforced “fetters” are preconditions for a successful capitalism. These are the lessons of economic history, not the deliverances of some kind of irrational faith, which Worrell suggests.

She also comments, “The film’s single-minded focus on the virtues of the free market is accompanied by a Calvinist streak. The entrepreneurial impulse contains elements “of God’s original creative act.” This is a quote from the film by Samuel Gregg, a Roman Catholic. The film is based on a book by a Roman Catholic priest, Robert Sirico, which Worrell elsewhere notes. Catholics aren’t Calvinists. Moreover, the idea that human beings are created in God’s image to be creators is a broadly Judeo-Christian idea, one shared even by deists like Thomas Jefferson.

On several occasions, Worrell criticizes the film because, apparently, it isn’t the film she thought we should have made: “Viewers hoping to learn more about the businesses Call’s featured entrepreneurs created will come away frustrated; the film is more interested in ideology than the actual logistics of entrepreneurship.” Again, she prefers the prejudicial word “ideology” to describe a perspective she simply disagrees with. In any case, this isn’t a valid criticism. The film is a response to the ubiquitous stereotype of business entrepreneurs as greedy misers that persists in both the entertainment and news media. It’s not a training film for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Posted by Jay Richards in News and Events at 15:48 | Leave a comment | Trackback

Defined tags for this entry:
acton institute, call of the entrepreneur, calvinism, entrepreneurship, fortune small business

The Nobel Peace Prize has lost all pretense to objectivity

Friday, October 12, 2007

Truth is definitely stranger than fiction, with Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sharing this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

In recent years, the Nobel Committee has shown itself more and more willing to name the Peace prize for political reasons. In awarding Al Gore and the IPCC the Peace Prize, however, the Nobel Committee has lost all pretense to objectivity. Not only are Al Gore and the IPCC shamelessly partisan choices, but also irrelevant ones. Whatever one thinks of their crusade to convince the world of catastrophic, human caused global warming, it has precious little to do with furthering world peace.

Gore seems to have anticipated the criticism. In his first statement, he explains: “The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.” Methinks this issue has much to do with ideology, and little to do with science.

[Ed. note: Hear Jay Richards discuss Gore’s peace prize on the G. Gordon Liddy show here.]

Posted by Jay Richards in Environmental Stewardship at 08:45 | Comments (6) | Trackback

Defined tags for this entry:
al gore, environmental stewardship, nobel peace prize, science

McClaren's Failure to Engage

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

I’ve followed with concern the debate over global warming for years. But it’s especially troubling to see self-identifying evangelicals weighing in on the issue with such a shallow understanding of the details. Brian McClaren is a case in point. Consider his recent post at the God’s Politics blog. McClaren is bemoaning the fact that some evangelical leaders, such as James Dobson, wrote a letter urging caution on the issue of global warming.

Now, whatever one’s views on this issue, it’s disturbing to see McClaren imply that these and other Christian leaders “oppose taking care of creation.” He quotes anonymous Christians from Asia who ask him:

Again and again, chagrined Christians ask me, “Is it true that some Christians in the U.S. still oppose taking care of creation?”

He then says that he does explain that some famous people (read: famous Christians like the ones referred to above) feel this way, but that many others follow the environmentalist party line like good Christians are supposed to do.

My question is this: Is McClaren so uninformed of the scientific and economic issues in the global warming debate that he actually thinks any Christian who disagrees with him “opposes taking care of creation”? Or is he intentionally misinforming fellow Christians on his international travels (where he has somehow learned that there’s no more debate about the nature of global warming)? In any case, Mr. McClaren needs to do some remedial reading if thinks the only people debating this are, as he puts it, “certain religious and semi-religious radio preachers, along with some fundraisers and lobbyists in the U.S.”

Posted by Jay Richards in Environmental Stewardship at 14:07 | Comments (3) | Trackback

Is Catholicism Green?

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Over at Planet Gore, I responded to Catholic layperson named Mary Colwell who seems to have her theological priorities out of whack:

Colwell complains that the Catholics are not consistently green, and hopes things will improve. She speaks as a Catholic, but I wonder where she’s getting her theology. She tells readers: “What is the true nature of our relationship with the earth? Get this right and everything else will begin to fall into place.” That’s the Green Gospel speaking. Jesus didn’t give the relationship between human beings and the Earth pride of place. He said that the first and greatest commandment is to love God, and the second is to love our neighbor as ourself. Everything follows from that. Christians of all stripes should take seriously our stewardship of the Earth. But our relationship to the Earth is not the first principle from which everything else follows.

Posted by Jay Richards in Environmental Stewardship at 10:32 | Comments (6) | Trackback

New Global Warming Blog

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

I’m contributing to a new blog at National Review Online, called Planet Gore, which focuses on the Global Warming controversy. Check it out.

Posted by Jay Richards in Environmental Stewardship at 10:48 | Comments (26) | Trackback

There are more environmentalist misanthropes than you think

Monday, June 12, 2006

On April 3, I reported the story of Texas scientist Eric Pianka, who allegedly argued in a speech that the only hope for the planet was for a mutated Ebola virus to exterminate 90% of the human population. Forrest Mims, who attended the speech, broke the story. Over the next few weeks, there was a media firestorm over the incident, and Mims was accused of misrepresenting Pianka’s speech. As a result, I received several emails telling me that I should retract the story. I did not, and I have no plans on doing so. I remain convinced that Mims basically got the story right.

The problem was that Pianka had asked that video cameras be turned off during his speech, and partial transcripts released later failed to fully corraborate Mims’ account. But, as Mims’ pointed out, the transcript lacked precisely the part of the speech with the offensive comments. In any event, Mims’ claim had several other corroborating pieces of evidence, which James Redford discusses in a blog posted entitled, “Forrest Mims Did Not Misrepresent Eric Pianka.” Cathy Young’s piece in the Boston Globe focused the issue properly: the point was not that Pianka had called for the active extermination of 90% of the population. It’s that he thought such an extermination by natural causes (like the Ebola virus) would be a “good thing.”

This story became especially irritating because many bloggers were more interested in the views of Forrest Mims than of Eric Pianka. Perhaps more troubling is that many commentators insisted that a respected scientist would never say that he looked forward to the deaths of billions of human beings. As a result, these commentators assigned Mims’ account a prior probability of about 0. This meant that virtually no evidence would be enough to confirm that Pianka had said more or less what Mims reported.

But anyone who reads widely in the environmental literature knows that suggestions such as Pianka’s are not uncommon. In fact, the desire for mass human death follows logically from the anti-human beliefs of some radical environmentalists. Some are more consistent in their beliefs than others. But Pianka is by no means the only person to express such opinions. Back in November, 2005, I reported on some personal correspondence from a prominent scientist, who expressed some Piankish views. He complained about “the devastation humans are currently imposing upon our planet” and then added:

Still, adding over seventy million new humans to the planet each year, the future looks pretty bleak to me. Surely, the Black Death was one of the best things that ever happened to Europe: elevating the worth of human labor, reducing environmental degradation, and, rather promptly, producing the Renaissance. From where I sit, Planet Earth could use another major human pandemic, and pronto!

Since I didn’t post the letter, however, I received several skeptical inquiries. So, in light of the recent events surrounding Pianka, I have decided to post a PDF of the letter. Anyone who looks at this letter will notice that it did not come from some obscure researcher, but from a scientist who for many years held a significant position. I do not post this for the purpose of harming the individual who sent this letter. Rather, I am posting it in hopes that more people will recognize that profound misanthropy is afoot in the academic and scientific community, most of it officially motivated by a desire to save the planet. It is naive to continue acting as if this type of death wish is reserved for isolated crackpots. On the contrary, it is well on its way to being respectable opinion in some quarters--held by the well educated and the otherwise civilized--just as eugenics was respectable a century ago.

Posted by Jay Richards in Environmental Stewardship at 10:24 | Comments (2) | Trackback

Defined tags for this entry:
environment, ethics, eugenics, population, stewardship

The 2006 Texas Distinguished Scientist wants you dead

Monday, April 3, 2006

Well, maybe not you personally. But in his speech to the Texas Academy of Science in March, University of Texas Professor Eric Pianka did announce his hope that a mutated Ebola virus would wipe out ninety percent of the human population--soon.

His motives are, of course, the essence of nobility. We’ve bred like rabbits, you see, and drastic measures are needed to restore the balance.

Amateur scientist Forrest Mims broke the story in his column for The Amateur Scientist. (Full disclosure: Mims is a friend.) Drudge picked up the story over the weekend, so it’s now grown legs. I expect Pianka will soon receive one of those ritual denunciations that certain public university professors receive when their more philosophically consistent conclusions leak out. What is especially troubling, however, is not that some eccentric scientist said something crazy. What is troubling is that he received a standing ovation from hundreds of members of the Texas Academy of Science, who were in attendance.

This is no April Fools’ Joke. In fact, Bianka already has at least one new convert.

Posted by Jay Richards in Environmental Stewardship at 15:35 | Comments (9) | Trackback

Defined tags for this entry:
environment, ethics, population

'It's capitalism or a habitable planet—you can't have both'

Saturday, March 4, 2006

. . . Or so claims Robert Newman in this article in The Guardian from February 2. It makes a great subject for a game of “Find-the-Fallacy.” Newman’s breezy inferences are reminiscent of The Communist Manifesto, edited to conform to trendy deep ecology. Here’s my favorite line: “Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet.” Well, I guess somebody has to shoot fish in a barrel: He’s obviously ignoring the very possibility that wealth is created, and apparently forgetting that the Earth isn’t an isolated planet in the void of space.

It might be tempting to dismiss articles like this. But Marxism mixed with deep ecology, unfortunately, leads to some strange and ominous claims, like this one: “To get from here to there we must talk about climate chaos in terms of what needs to be done for the survival of the species rather than where the debate is at now or what people are likely to countenance tomorrow morning.” What needs to be done for the survival of the species regardless of what people are willing to accept? This looks to me like a thinly veiled justification for all sorts of atrocities. Let’s hope Mr. Newman never finds himself in the position to impose his misanthropic vision on the rest of us.

Posted by Jay Richards in Environmental Stewardship at 13:05 | Comment (1) | Trackback

Defined tags for this entry:
capitalism, environment

Hollywood and Capitalism

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Clive Cook has a terrific article in the March 2006 Atlantic Monthly that is worth reading in its entirety. But here’s my favorite paragraph:

What is most striking, so far as the movies’ treatment of capitalism goes, is not the hostility of films whose main purpose is actually to indict corporate wickedness (Wall Street, Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, The Insider, The Constant Gardener, and so forth). It is the idea of routine, reckless corporate immorality—maintained as though this premise were inoffensive, uncontroversial, and hardly worthy of comment—that drives movies whose principal interest lies elsewhere, whether in the human drama of contemporary geopolitics (Syriana, to cite a recent instance), knockabout comedy (Fun with Dick & Jane), children’s fantasy (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), star-crossed romance (In Good Company), or, classically, in some dystopian near or distant future (Alien, The Terminator, Blade Runner, Robocop, and many others).

The point is not that such movies, or the culture more generally, argue that capitalism is evil. Just the opposite: it is that they so often merely assume, innocently and expecting to arouse no skepticism, that capitalism is evil.

I’ve been compiling a list of popular movies in which the business entrepreneur is treated in a positive manner. It’s a very sparse list. One of the few I’ve thought of is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The fact that Cook cites it in his list illustrates that even this is an ambiguous example. There are bad-guy business people who want to steal Willie Wonka’s secrets, but at least in its most recent incarnation, with John Depp playing Willie Wonka, Wonka is portrayed as a good, if highly eccentric, entrepreneur. Perhaps this is the exception that proves the rule. When Hollywood occasionally portrays an entrepreneur positively, he must highly eccentric--that is, atypical.

I’m sure there are some exceptions to the Hollywood theme of business=evil, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head.

Posted by Jay Richards in Business and Society at 09:11 | Comment (1) | Trackback

Who Argues that the Environment Doesn't Matter?

Thursday, February 9, 2006

The Chicago Tribune has a story about the Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI) launched February 8th. (See my initial response here.) Most reports of this story have been somewhat fair. But the Chicago Tribune story takes an unjustified swipe at evangelicals who disagree with the ECI statement. The reporter, Frank James, describes the disagreement among evangelical Christians this way:

But environmental issues have proved divisive within the body of believers who identify themselves as evangelicals. Some who believe the world is in the “end times,” with a return of Jesus imminent, have not seen the necessity of protecting the environment for the long term. Others, meanwhile, have taken the view espoused by the evangelicals who unveiled their campaign Wednesday, that humans were given dominion over the Earth with the responsibility to protect it.

This should be printed in journalism textbooks as an obvious case of media bias. Notice the false dilemma: If you’re an evangelical, you either you agree with the ECI or you don’t care about the environment because you’re expecting the Lord’s return any day now. I read several evangelical responses to the ECI yesterday, and this is one argument that I didn’t see. I note that James doesn’t offer any quotes from representative evangelical leaders who make this argument. Hmm. I wonder why?

If I had to guess, I would say that Frank James has the “James Watt Myth” planted in his memory. James Watt was Secretary of the Interior under President Reagan. It was reported that he once said in congressional testimony: “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.” This calumny has been repeated countless times by figures such as Bill Moyers. There’s only one problem. The story is false. The Chicago Tribune has now made the false story a generic argument of “some evangelicals.” If Frank James can provide some current, direct quotes by representative evangelical leaders (not random loose cannons) who argue that the environment is unimportant because Jesus is about to return, I’ll be the first on record denouncing the argument. If he can’t produce such quotes, then he should retract this statement.

Posted by Jay Richards in Environmental Stewardship at 08:59 | Leave a comment | Trackback

Defined tags for this entry:
evangelical climate initiative, evangelicals, global warming