AN OPEN LETTER TO STUDENT ACHIEVERS

Stuart K. Hayashi


Dear Young Achievers,

             Whether you are in college or high school, you constantly bombarded with the message that you have a duty to use your skills to serve society; and that, if you use them only for youself, that would be selfish and therefore immoral. You are taught to feel guilty for pursuing your own happiness and success, especially if you read the University of Hawaii's newspaper Ka Leo O Hawaii.
           You should accept none of that unearned guilt that the Joshua Coopers of the world are shoving down your throats. As for you young millionaire engineers from Hawaii, you ought to stop being so Marxist, and recognize the fact that, without your businessmen bosses, whom you believe to be exploiting your work, you--the engineers--wouldn't have such overvalued stock in the first place, and would therefore not be millionaires!
            You business majors need to learn that everything they learned in “Business Ethics” is a sham; that there is no “social responsibility” but only individual responsibility; that your only obligation to that faceless, floating abstraction we call “society” should be that you do not intentionally harm anyone, and that you compensate those whom they have harmed unintentionally. You ought ot know that you do not need to “give back” because you will already “give back” by supplying valuable products and services; that any money you give away afterwards is not duty, but charity. You need to learn that the worst type of business is a hippy-styled co-op, in which the customers own the profits and redistribute equally among all members of the firm, with limits on the electricity it uses, because such operations are too small and inefficient to serve a global economy, and nations dependent on foreign efficiency--such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan--would perish when America switched to such a system. It is imperative to your own lives that you realize that the most unethical business practice of all is not firing workers, cutting wages, opening plants in Third-World countries, or even giving “campaign contributions,” but to lobby and accept government subsidies--for businessmen to resort to, of all things, socialism. That is the paramount unethical practice. You need to know that the most ethical business practice of all is not setting up a hippy-style co-op, or in giving money away, or in forcing employees to perform boring volunteer work, but in promoting the happiness, achievement, and economic freedom of itself and others, which it can do by making money while resisting the urge to lobby for such competetion-stifling directives as tariffs, import quotas, farm price supports, antitrust suits, state-imposed franchises, occupational licensing, eminent domain, and the subsidization of any industry through government purchase for "free" distribution, as in the case of condoms, food bought from food stamps, and, of course, the payment of farmers not to farm.
            Subsidy-grabbing is the only major sin commonly held by big business, because it takes from others. Hiring and firing people extorts no one of anything they had to begin with. At UH Manoa, environmental science students should learn that they should trust empirical evidence of reality more than in hearsay of professors and pre-fabricated computer models; Biosystems Engineering majors, that they are simply advancing progress; engineers, that they are not the only hardworking employees of their company; political science majors, that learning to leave people alone is morally superior than fueling their own powerlust; business majors, that individual profit and happiness is no sin.
             And while you achievers do improve the world greater than that of any social worker, that is not the final justification for your work. The ultimate justification is that each individual has the right to live for his own sake and own happiness; that they do not deprive others of this; that individual achievement and prosperity is the greatest feat of all. So go out there and be happy. You owe it, not to “society,” but to yourself.

Here's to you,
Stuart Hayashi



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