Ideas can, indeed, be quite intoxicating, whether they are good ideas or bad ones. They invoke strong passions and spark revolutions. In this century, we have witnessed first the rise of a world empire committed to the ideas of Karl Marx, followed by its dissolution and demise at the hands of a more powerful idea – that of freedom and free markets.
John Maynard Keynes, the late British economist, put it well in 1936 when he wrote, "the ideas of the economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."
It will not come as a surprise to many in the business world that ideas hostile to free enterprise and private property have had a dramatic effect for much of this century. A public sector that imposes more regulations than ever on the private sector and consumes at least five times the share of national income it consumed at the turn of the century is stark evidence of those ideas.
An even more disturbing bit of evidence came from a study a few years ago of network television in America: Only three percent of businesspeople depicted on television, the Media Institute found, were involved in "socially useful or economically productive" behavior.
The same study reported that more than half of all corporate chiefs on TV committed illegal acts ranging from fraud to murder. And a special PBS program entitled Hollywood's Favorite Heavy: Businessmen on Prime–Time TV, declared, "By the age of 18, the average kid has seen businessmen on TV attempt over 10,000 murders."