There are two startling disclosures in today’s New York Times, even by modern debased standards.
One is “Once a Neglected Treatment, Now an Expensive Specialty Drug” about how medicine until recently selling for $13.50 a tablet has been acquired by a new owner that now charges $750.
The other is “Volkswagen Stops Selling Diesel Cars Facing U. S. Inquiry” that describes how the company purposefully programmed software for their diesel engines to circumvent emission control inspections and those engines expel “forty times the pollution allowed under the Clean Air Act.”
These are incredible acts of moral depravity and avarice. But contrary to what President Jack Kennedy’s father told him, they are not representative of all business people… far from it.
But what is startling to us is the willingness of decent business people to sit quietly and even hob nob socially with predators that openly and unabashedly mislead and loot the public.
The Convention Center debacle and the proposed CRIZ programs are examples of such doings here in Lancaster.
It is only when those of us who have succeeded in honorable and productive ways decry the exploiters of society, denouncing them publicly and spurning them privately, that a higher standard for doing business and for democracy will again be established.
We have told the story of how in 1947 or thereabouts our mother spurned the friendly greeting of an acquaintance who had been convicted of counterfeiting food stamps during the Second World War. That type of righteousness needs to be reintroduced to our society in general and here in Lancaster in particular.
