NYT Co., a Multi-Billion Dollar Enterprise, Publishes 'Capitalists and Other Psychopaths'
Psycho-capitalism? The overwhelmingly liberal readership of the New York Times is predictably eating up a charged story in the increasingly pretentious and hard-left Sunday Review section, "Capitalists And Other Psychopaths," by left-wing essayist William Deresiewicz, a critic who often writes for The Nation. Bringing the article to life is a cartoon of two men with painted smiles torturing ants with a magnifying glass. The text box: "Rich people are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law. No surprise."
As of Monday afternoon it was the paper's second-most read and e-mailed story (behind a more substantive Times magazine cover story on diagnosing children as psychopaths), as liberal readers ironically used tools honed and perfected by capitalists to spread a tale -- published by a capitalist organization, the New York Times Company, with revenues of $2.3 billion in 2011 -- of the utter wickedness of capitalists.
There is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.
The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior. This should hardly be news. The English writer Bernard Mandeville asserted as much nearly three centuries ago in a satirical-poem-cum-philosophical-treatise called “The Fable of the Bees.”
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In other words, Enron, BP, Goldman, Philip Morris, G.E., Merck, etc., etc. Accounting fraud, tax evasion, toxic dumping, product safety violations, bid rigging, overbilling, perjury. The Walmart bribery scandal, the News Corp. hacking scandal -- just open up the business section on an average day. Shafting your workers, hurting your customers, destroying the land. Leaving the public to pick up the tab. These aren’t anomalies; this is how the system works: you get away with what you can and try to weasel out when you get caught.
I always found the notion of a business school amusing. What kinds of courses do they offer? Robbing Widows and Orphans? Grinding the Faces of the Poor? Having It Both Ways? Feeding at the Public Trough? There was a documentary several years ago called “The Corporation” that accepted the premise that corporations are persons and then asked what kind of people they are. The answer was, precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests.
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Comments
Extremely Rich vs Extremely Poor
Submitted by Kingfish17 on Tue, 05/15/2012 - 10:31am.
I've met plenty of very wealthy people, some honest and some dishonest. I've also run into numerous panhandlers and bums begging for money, and still do on a regular basis. I've never met one panhandler or bum who is honest about why they want a handout.
"You can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas...on the taxpayer’s dime." Barack Obama
Oops, am I racist?
Submitted by DontFeedTheTrolls on Tue, 05/15/2012 - 10:33am.
Yeah, I'll go with the local crack whore or cop-killer if I want somebody who's honest, truthful and law abiding.
Just as the left does.
There are lots of points to argue, but let's pick a couple
Submitted by Galvanic on Tue, 05/15/2012 - 10:33am.
Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior.
Pure Capitalism
Submitted by Kingfish17 on Tue, 05/15/2012 - 10:50am.
If you want to define a business area that is capitalism at it's purest form, I would go with the technology industry. A small amount of regulation exist because of limited wave spectrums when it comes to wireless devices, but besides that, the industry is very lightly regulated. The purer form of capitalism for the tech industry has transformed the world over the last forty years, and will continue this transformation, as long as government stays out of the way.
Wall Street is the exact opposite. It's probably the heaviest regulated of all the major business areas in the country. The partnership between Wall Street and Washington and the regulations that create that partnership have done more to harm the economy and have exacerbated the normal boom and bust cycles than anything imaginable.
"You can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas...on the taxpayer’s dime." Barack Obama
I agree
Submitted by Galvanic on Tue, 05/15/2012 - 10:59am.
Actually, I was entering my comment to the author's assumption when it was reempted.
What I was trying to enter was exactly your point. WS is anything but pure capitalism. It is overregulated, and most of the bad behavior has to do with violating or circumventing the rules, or manipulating them to a tactical advantage.
Most business people are honest.
Who's psychopathic?
Submitted by SickofLibs on Tue, 05/15/2012 - 10:48am.
NYT is arguably the biggest supporter of OWS.
And what does OWS hate more than anything else? Capitalists.
"Psychopaths are generally regarded as callous, selfish, dishonest, arrogant, aggressive, impulsive, irresponsible, and hedonistic. Despite this, psychopaths are often superficially charming and can be highly adept at manipulation. There is at most only a weak association between pschyopathy and high IQ."
The irony
Submitted by Galvanic on Tue, 05/15/2012 - 12:14pm.
The New York Times is the naked guy standing in the middle of the piranha tank, scattering chum to the hungry residents. Sooner or later, they'll take bites out of him.
Just because the NYT can't make a profit
Submitted by Radical1979 on Tue, 05/15/2012 - 10:55am.
it's now evil when someone else does.
What are these people, eight years old?
The NYT article is bigotry in its pure form
Submitted by lgeubank on Tue, 05/15/2012 - 2:03pm.
That author would have fit in perfectly on the staff of Der Stürmer if his target had been Jews instead of the rich . His article is a perfect compendium of the tropes and methods of bigots such as anti-Semites, anti-capitalists, and all other bigoted, malicious ideologues.
His core accusation comes from that old fraud Karl Marx, who said capitalists only gain wealth by exploiting "surplus value" from the toil of the workers. As this guy puts it, "Workers use labor to create wealth for entrepreneurs — the excess productivity, over and above wages and other compensation, that goes to corporate profits." If you can quote Marx's "surplus value" canard seriously at this point in history, you're too bigoted and idiotic to ever learn anything.
The rest of the author's piece (I won't say piece of what) is just a catalog of character assassination and slurs. For him, it's not this or that capitalist, this or that wealthy person, this or that Jew who is guilty of bad character. All bigots criticize and condemn a whole category, smearing them all with lurid accusations, and denouncing all members of his chosen category for the mere fact of being in that category, whether it is capitalist, wealthy person, or Jew.
Looking at this article, we can get a better picture of what it would have been like to live in Germany in the 30's, and to see the anti-Semitic propaganda in the newspapers at the time. We can see how people react when they read such blanket condemnations of a targeted scapegoat. It is an object lesson and an insight into history and the psychology of mobs and mass movements.
They are HYPOCRITES plain and simple
Submitted by OldJarhead77 on Tue, 05/15/2012 - 11:48am.
Nuff said
So What?
Submitted by ledurchi on Tue, 05/15/2012 - 12:03pm.
Even if the worst of the author's grievances against the rich, the capitalists are true, what is the point of the complaint? Does he need to justify the call for stealing from the rich via "taxes"? Does the economic standing of the victim define the nobility, or lack thereof, the theft? Being no fan of the moneyed class myself, it still seems bewildering that envy has become a virtue. Minding your own business has become a lost art.
Rich people deal with more laws...magnitudes more.
Submitted by upcountrywater on Tue, 05/15/2012 - 12:28pm.
Rich people need to get advice from lots of people to fend off zillions of stupid laws.
So when a well paid CPA firm gives the wrong information, who's fault is it?
Of course fault viewed from the OWS mentality equals lying...
As if the pan handler files a extension on a 250 page tax return, or an EIS form, on and on and on.
NYT Co., a Multi-Billion Dollar Enterprise.... Not a chance.... After discounting $1,004.5 million of intangible assets, The New York Times Company has an allowable net worth of negative $340.4 million.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/englund/englund60.1.html
You Didn't Build That.
Leftist Projection & Copycatting
Submitted by HardRightTurn on Tue, 05/15/2012 - 12:38pm.
This Leftist took an article from somewhere (maybe the author below the line) and, using a wordprocessor, did a global find and replace on the words "liberal, progressive, Democrat, socialist, communist, Leftist, etc." substituting words indicating the Right. It's what the Leftists do, over and over and over again. It's right out of the Leftist playbook "Rules for Radicals".
To more fully comprehend the Left, one must read “Leftism As Psychopathy” by John Ray, M.A., Ph.D. Caution, it might scare you a little bit.
http://jonjayray.tripod.com/psycho.html
Wait!!!!!! Haven't the
Submitted by texastommy on Tue, 05/15/2012 - 12:39pm.
Wait!!!!!!
Haven't the libtards always told us that poverty causes crime? Now it's wealth? Oh no!!!!!!! What do we do? WHAT do we do????