Oh dear. Contact Energy directors are hardly flavour of the week. In the midst of an economic free fall they want to double their fees because it’s been a while since the last raise! Somehow I doubt they’re having trouble affording their café lattes. Or if they are, perhaps it’s because they’re trying to recoup their own investment losses over the last couple of months.
I really hate being cynical, but in this case we are viewing nothing but greed. A friend in the financial industry said they could always look for better director’s fees offshore. Yeah right! I’m sure they are in hot demand in the States at the moment.
After hearing the pointed question on Tele last night, “do you think you are under paid?” to which the director answered “yes”, I was trying to imagine how $1000.00 a day was too little for the work done. Personally I have had enough of this kind of “personal worth” mentality that appears to have extracted business men and women from the realms of reality, responsibility and ethics.
I didn’t sleep too well last night. I found myself thinking about free market versus government control. America is knee deep in it’s own moral economic failure and most Western countries are afflicted with same downfall to some degree. This got me thinking. What was the American dream? To get rich?
James Adams coined the phrase in his 1931 book, Epic America. He claimed, “The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” It was never get rich at the expense of everyone else. Oddly enough that’s why they rejected the European class structure - a structure that ensured the wealth of a few at the expense of the majority. So it’s ironic that the country appears to have become what it intentionally rejected.
Certainly in the States anyone can make a buck, but after a few generations there is now a solid politico-military class structure and it’s wealthy, powerful and greedy.
Does New Zealand want the American dream? Actually, yes.
But how are we going to go about it? Through tighter controls or fewer controls? It’s now the question of our age in a global crisis.
The question is one of trust – it always has been. Trust the individual or trust the government. History doesn’t help us much here, because it would appear neither is especially trustworthy.
In it’s opening chapters the Bible tells us why. It says we were told not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – we would become like God. So we did, and since then we have struggled to balance our moral equations. We are faced with constant choice – self-interest or the greater good. Doing the right in the face of the wrong or doing the wrong to achieve the good.
As I go to an election this year, I have prayed more about the decision than at any other time. After all, who's going to guide us through the economic moral maze we call the future?
Digby Wilkinson © 2008