| | "growth" in an ethical business is a consequence of some other more fundamental goal. It is not itself a goal, but rather. a consequence.
For example, when the founders of HP still influenced the company, their goal was to create the best lab and analytical equipment in the world, and their means to that goal was "the HP Way." The essence of the idea, radical at the time, was that employees' brainpower was the company's most important resource.
Their ethical behavior followed from those means.
A consequence of that goal, achieved via that means, was growth. Reward in the marketplace for ethical performance.
Compare that with the often heard mantra coming out of American Business Schools for decades, far and wide: "grow or die."
Growth became the goal. Growth became the focus. It was a jump ahead to the consequences, worthier goals and means be damned.
With this new focus, what used to be ethical goals and means became cost centers, to be minimized, sacrificed on the altar of the totally rudderless and empty God, 'growth.'
If you were to set out a hundred years or so ago in this nation with a desire to destroy it, then crippling its business culture with a blind perseverance on 'growth' would be hard to beat as a tactic.
Was that, in fact, the reason? Was the blind focus on 'growth' an actual attack on this once free and thriving nation by smart adversaries selling an alternate paradigm in the world, anathema to freedom?
What was once an external conflict has long become primarily an internal conflict, modern politics in America, where fully half of modern politics, based on forced association, can hardly even be called 'politics' if a proper understanding of the word was widely held.
Assume that this once free nation once was actually in a global conflict with smart totalitarian leaning adversaries. What was going to prevent such an attack, aimed at our business schools and universities?
Was it our non-police state? Our nearly open borders and immigration policy? Was it our totally open campuses, and a fanatic devotion to complete academic freedom-- a freedom that even tolerated freedom eating ideas?
We readily study 'cancer' in modern universities, but we for sure don't tolerate, under complete academic freedom, any active advocacy to infect the population at large with cancer. In the context of freedom, so should have been the case with 'Marxism.' It should have been freely studied, like cancer, with the hope for a someday cure. But in the political context of freedom, the concept of complete academic freedom was turned on its ear, and the result is, a nation that can no longer intellectually define freedom is in no position to defend it.
Was any of that what was going to thwart a determined and clever adversary from taking aim at the choke points of our education institutions, and if not knocking the legs out from under a free nation, at the very least, significantly crippling this nation's intellectual ability to defend the source, ways, and means of our freedom?
"grow or die." Dangerously pithy bumper sticker wisdom, just like "It's the economy, stupid!" shouldn't be the flimsy basis for organizing tribal sensibilities, public or private.
What is a reasonable litmus, in the context of freedom, to weigh ethical public actions? I don't think there is any better than the concept of free association vs. forced association. An ethical business, as well as an ethical government, is vigilent about instances of forced association, and embraces only free association. the mission of an ethical state, in all instances, is to inhibit the unchecked application of forced association.
Murder, rape, extortion, theft, the offering of false value for real value, and even, the fouling of the commons are all examples where the appearance of forced association clarifies the ethics of actions, both by private entities as well as public/state entities charged with regulation and enforcement of the law.
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