The picture right here depicts a slice of life from 1905, earlier than fire-fighting tools had advanced into an early model of the vans we now have at this time. (To skeptics, of which I used to be one earlier than I regarded this up: each the supply of water, the hearth hydrant, and the fashionable battery to energy the headlight had been developed greater than 100 years earlier.)
It is a reminder of how the final 120 years, due purely to enhancements in expertise, has made our lives safer, longer, more healthy, extra productive, and extra handy than they’ve ever been prior to now. However think about this, at that earlier time, was it conceivable at this time that:
• The chief of one in every of our two political events could be a legal conman? Does any reliable historian regard Teddy Roosevelt as a sociopath?
• The world’s #1 automaker, Volkswagen, which led #2 Toyota by over $32 billion in income as of June 2023, may have probably determined, as an organization, to tear off 11 million clients, and one other 8 billion individuals on Earth who use their lungs to breathe, with its scheme to defraud emissions rules?
• Wells Fargo, 41 years outdated when this bicycle was made, could be ordered to pay $3.7 billion in penalties and victims’ compensation for alleged unlawful practices that induced hundreds of the financial institution’s clients to lose their houses and automobiles?
We’ve made a commerce, whether or not we wish it or not, from ethical decency to creature consolation and the gross abuse of the widespread American shopper.
All I can say about this personally, and I’m positive my ideas are echoed by most of my friends who made their cash within the late twentieth Century, is that we had been fortunate to reside in a time through which enterprise morality nonetheless meant one thing.