Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, has published a vacuous essay in the New York Times headlined, “We Need a New Capitalism.” Perhaps it has never occurred to Benioff — as it never seems to occur to men of his kind — that the skills and habits that enable one to build a successful company are not infinitely transferable to other enterprises, or even in many cases narrowly transferable to other enterprises. And the enterprise Benioff here considers — reorganizing the economic behavior and the related intellectual infrastructure of the developed world as a whole along lines based, as far as he indicates, on very little more than his own prejudice and intuition — is the definition of hubris.
If only there were some obvious example that making a great deal of money in business does not necessarily suit one to the role of omnicompetent philosopher-king. Give me a minute, I’m sure I can think of one, as soon as I’m done watching the news out of Syria.