“Enough”⁠↗

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, the late Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … Enough.”

We’re moving, or so it seems, to a world where we’re no longer making anything in this country; we’re merely trading pieces of paper, swapping stocks and bonds back and forth with one another, and paying our financial croupiers a veritable fortune. We’re also adding even more costs by creating ever more complex financial derivatives in which huge and unfathomable risks are being built into our financial system.

Harvard Business School Professor Rakesh Khurana was right when he defined the conduct of a true professional with these words: “I will create value for society, rather than extract it.”

I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man.”