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In recent years, it really did seem like the media put in the effort to not glorify mass shooters by plastering their image all over the place, fueling speculation as to their motives, and generally making them look cool. There are major shooting incidents to which I don't even remember the perpetrator's name. It finally sank in that this kind of attention was counterproductive.
Which is why I am fascinated by the Luigi Mangione story. He cracked the code. News outlets are showing his face 24-7. Everyone is talking about the issues that he wants us to be talking about. This guy is the most famous, most popular, and, if the ladies are to be believed, sexiest criminal of the 21st century. Why? Basic competence at not being immediately apprehended? Selecting an unpopular target? Being attractive? Not being unattractive?
The mood on social media feels like the end of Joker. Full mask-off glorification of murder, but it's gleeful -- giddy even. Part of the thrill of voting for Trump was the idea that the people, through sheer collective desire, could will one person out of prison, to look at someone prosecuted by the justice system and say, "no, we have his back". Can it be any surprise that the left wants in on this intoxicating elixir?
Choice of target. Mangione isn't a mass shooter, he's an assassin, and he chose a target that almost anyone could at least understand wanting to kill.
I'm kind of hoping that Crooks broke the school shooter trend, and our disaffected white boys will start shooting ceos and politicians rather than children. Even assuming the CEOs don't deserve it, one dead CEO is an improvement over twenty dead kids.
I'm actually not so sure about that. CEOs are, no offense, more important than regular people. This is true descriptively if not normatively. If CEOs stop maximizing shareholder value because they have concerns for their physical safety, that could have sizable effects on the economy.
Maximizing shareholder value is not the sole goal humanity should have. This is strawman paperclip maximizer talk.
Do you want Big Drug CEOs working hard to medicalize normal human experience and sell expensive and unreliable anti-depressants? Do you want yet more chemicals nobody's ever heard of in food to make it slightly cheaper? Should Lockheed Martin lobby for a more hawkish than strictly necessary foreign policy stance? Should Microsoft put yet more spyware in our PCs and sell our data?
I hold Lockheed Martin and Microsoft shares because I've got a certain model of how the world works. But it is not necessarily good when the green line goes up!
Sure, but one problem is that from what I see, the most common alternative goal to "maximizing shareholder value" ends up being DEI, ESG and "forcing behaviors."
I used to think that the problem was indeed that people are trying to corrupt amoral business with moralism. But the woke are right in that this is just internalizing a different set of morals, not rejecting morality altogether.
There isn't really an escape from the moral landscape and the culture war. Humans can't operate solely as economic units. It's just not something we can possibly do. Some of it may be suspended to allow oneself to trade with strangers, but when you're dealing with something like health, the true nature of our relationships reasserts itself: letting grandma die because saving her isn't worth the price is monstrous even is rational.
In fact in this I think Mises and ancaps are more correct and less ideological than Hayek and neolibs, since their framework of individual action allows for moral tastes.
The neutrality of the 90s that some want back into was not really neutrality, it was a widespread agreement on moral principle (at least outwardly).
Your gripe isn't really that businessmen have to adhere to moral codes, it's that the moral codes are written by your enemies and letting businessmen get away with anything is better than having them do you wrong systematically. But you should want for businessmen to adhere to moral codes that benefit or are neutral towards you, ultimately. Because them getting away with anything is not stable.
Yes, exactly.
Sure. But I don't think that's achievable at the moment. So, again that leaves "letting businessmen get away with anything" as a second-best alternative. Come the Reaction, come our Augustus, then we can talk about moral frameworks beyond "shareholder value."
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