Word: self-interest
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What it all boils down to is the trite but true observation that voters are all too often seduced into voting against their own self-interest and traditional beliefs by smokescreens like abortion, Elian Gonzalez or school prayer. Times are tough for liberal Catholics over at St. Paul’s church, and the political landscape has slowly shifted further right. Republicans have been drooling for Jewish votes, dangling the Israel-Palestine issue as a carrot. I hope that liberals at Hillel heed the warnings from what has happened to American Catholics...
...cast is headed by James Spader as defense lawyer Alan Shore, an ethically challenged former embezzler who uses his powers of sleaze to help his colleagues, his clients and his self-interest. The gamble seems to have worked. The show topped NBC's heavily touted Rob Lowe drama, The Lyon's Den, and Spader's complex, even sympathetic performance gives the show more interest than it has had in years. (A stunt casting turn by Sharon Stone helped too.) The old characters, Kelley says, "would always do the right moral thing at the end of the day. That occasioned...
...comment “Self-Righteous Liberals at 19” (Oct. 14), Luke Smith ’04 defends future CEOs by ridiculing liberal students who “choose [self-interest] as a target for their indignation,” especially “considering Adam Smith’s philosophy in the Wealth of Nations—that self-interest best serves society...
Unfortunately, we live in a world where inheritance does exist and where wealth equals power. Competition only produces quality when everyone plays with the same hand of cards, but, ironically, the very self-interest that drives competition encourages the wealthy to stack the deck—and in American society, they have the power to do it. We would need truly radical social change before Smith’s analysis could be applied meaningfully to the real world...
Maybe students with fewer “worldly concerns” recoil in horror at the thought of making money. But the universal nature of self-interest suggests that the CEO and the liberal activist are fundamentally the same: The activist finds his own fulfillment in activism and the manipulation of power structures that accompanies it. (Remember that, in social movements, there is always a demagogue who stands to gain. “Hasta la victoria siempre!”) As the quest for wealth is no more self-interested or self-gratifying than is the quest for power, Harvard?...