Bottom Line Ethic in U.S.
Shall we pursue Norman Lear’s article (Opinion, March 15), “Bottom Line Becomes a Bad American Ethic,” a bit further?
Some letters to The Times (March 26) carry some worshipful responses to Lear’s moralistic preachments. The respondents concur: the greed and chicanery of the American businessman, as well as his unethical, uncaring conduct, will be the undoing of the nation. One gloomy adherent parrots Lear’s observation that, “The real villain is the climate.”
Quite so. And at the same time, by turning to the Business Section of the same issue of The Times, it can be learned that Norman Lear, Preston Tisch, the postmaster general, and actor Sidney Poitier, among about 400 other highly motivated, famous and merely filthy rich individuals will have to cough up in excess of $200 million, as a result of an allegedly fraudulent tax write-off scheme in which they participated before 1987. Plus, of course, penalties of as high as 50%. Said The Times, “The scheme allowed investors write-offs worth four times their cash investments.”
These investors face no criminal charges. They’re clean. But as spectacularly financially successful businessmen the whole lot must have been real babes in the woods. Or asleep at their ledgers. Maybe even intensely concerned with their bottom lines. Assuredly childlike in their trust of their advisers.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said he would not comment on whether the investors’ actions were unethical. He did add, “I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep sympathizing with their problems.”
Anyway, Norman Lear has burst into print to savage American business ethics of “profits at any cost.” It hardly seems necessary to remind him that the bottom line--”net-net,” as it were--means what’s left after expenses and, yes, taxes. It would seem redundant to create still another federal bureaucracy, the Department of Business Ethics; the Internal Revenue Service apparently already has a pretty good handle on it.
As for the climate being the real villain, let Lear ponder a paraphrase of Walt Kelley’s ineffable Pogo: “We have met the villains and they are us.”
W.R. WATKINS
Los Angeles
