Video: The Entrepreneurial Vocation (Acton Institute)

Transcript Below:

Mike Malloy:                         If you retire one day and there's no social security money because of [inaudible 00:27:6] savings plans, and all the money that should be in social security has gone into the pockets of the brokers and the stock market thugs and liars and cheats and sneaks and gamblers today.

Noam Chomsky:                  The United States is a business-run society, which means that human rights are subordinated to the overwhelming, overriding need to profit for investors. Decisions are placed in the hands of unaccountable private tyranny.

Robert Sirico:                       Think of the reality that exists in our societies today. Every minority - human and nonhuman - is protected in culture and in law except one group - business people. There's an open season on business people. When was the last time you saw a positive portrayal of a business person in the media? Or is it always the stereotype of the Enron. Is it always the stereotype of the conspiracy in a boardroom to somehow further impoverish the poor?

Isn't that the image that is portrayed in the media? Isn't that the image that is portrayed in many of our pulpits?

The great myth of Marxism, which has now kind of been diluted but still is quite potent in the assumptions of clergy, even in the assumptions of business people is that the world of the economy is a static pie. The ones who have little pieces of the pie have little pieces, because the ones who have big pieces have big pieces. And the solution to it is to take from those who have and give to those who have not.

But the economy is not static. We can grow the pie and thereby, enrich people. It's a dynamic view. I think we've done an injustice and too easily canonizing the poor and demonizing the rich. How ought we to think about economics? How ought we to think about the human beings, the men and women, who are the prime movers of the economy, the workers - indeed, the entrepreneurs? In large part, we found at the Acton Institute to think through these questions.

I believe that a market economy better enables the poor to rise from poverty, better enables the vulnerable and the marginalized to be protected. Very few clergy will stand up and speak that explicitly.

The institution of economic liberty is the necessary prerequisite for the production of wealth, which not only serves utilitarian function in serving the needs of the poor, because after all, you have to produce wealth before you can distribute it. But also, and more profoundly and more importantly is the outworking of a vocation in the hearts and in the minds of men and women who are called by God to be creative and to be productive.

This is first and foremost a sacred vocation. Consider how the mind of the entrepreneur seeks and risks to discover that which has not yet been discovered. And once it is discovered, to bring it in to human relationships, transforming it often at great risk and placing it at human service. No business person can ever make money in a free economy if they don't do exactly that, if they don't find something that can be used by other people and valued by other people. That's what the vocation of business is - to look for opportunities to serve.