The Worm Turns...

It has long been the habit of the Western mind to deify the entrepreneur and business in general, as if the making of a buck from an idea is the highest form of human achievement. But is it? Really? Agreed, the economic drivers behind human society - given that capitalism is your sole model and modus operandi - depend on innovation and the exploitation of that innovation in largely profit-driven terms: I get it. But what I don't get is the almost religious fervour that the dogma of business and how it relates to society obtains in discussions about regulating business practices through legislation. Take the case of the British woman who has successfully gained a court ruling against Meta's unsanctioned use of her data in targeting her with directed advertising feeds. On Radio Four this morning it was suggested by the interviewer [of this self-same person] that ruling that Meta should cease and desist from using that user's data to target advertising somehow breaks the very business model of Meta, as if in violation of some fundamental law of physics. No, it's simply a question of human rights that should lie far outwith the concerns of the grubby, prosaic domain of money making. Therein lies the rub of it: there is an implicit code running through almost all discussion of business - economic, political and even moral - that any intervention in the practice of business is per se wrong. This has particularly been the accepted wisdom ever since the dawn of hands-off neoliberal thinking, and it is fundamentally, humanly wrong. The simple fact is that most people have neither the native wit, guile or drive to be entrepreneurial: it's simply not in their nature. Does that make them in some sense inferior to those that do? Of course not, they simply sit on the balancing side of the equation: no entrepreneur or business can survive without a customer; it's a two-way street, and the deifying of one side of the equation is simply a distortion of the situation and has enabled the normalisation of enormous economic inequality, particularly of late. The survival of the fittest is a brutalist extrapolation of evolutionary theory. We are better than that: at least we should be, by now...