Making Light on Common (DoublePlusUn)Good
It’s been a while since I’ve pointed to a good, juicy business lie. So here’s a nice one: From Making Light: Common fraud. It exposes the corporate underpinnings of the allegedly “grassroots” organization Common Good, an advocacy group looking to promote the idea that we desperately need to expand the legal rights of corporations and curtail those of individuals if we are to preserve our way of life.
Never doubt that it’s worth their while to lie to you. When you’re talking about really big corporations and really big money, it’s worth their while to lie to you very, very elaborately.
December 6th, 2004 at 3:06 pm
“To widen the market and to narrow the competition is always the interest of the dealers… The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted, till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith. Page 267, Glasgow edition.
Elaborately Lie? For money? What a radical theory!