[BOB] ABERNETHY: And when a corporation has enormous power, such power that if it messes up it can hurt the entire country and perhaps the entire world? Should that corporation have a special degree of regulation?
Dr. [DAVID] MILLER: I’m reluctant to pick out or single a particular corporation, but certainly, and we’ve done it historically, certain industries””the energy industry, the communication industry””some are so big and so important that we do regulate them. I don’t know yet if the problem with our current financial meltdown is that we need new regulation or that the existing regulators didn’t do their job ”” the SEC, the ratings agencies, the actuarial firms. A lot of people could of caught this and didn’t. Certainly people need to do their existing jobs better as far as oversight is concerned. Whether we need new regulation ”” the jury’s out on that.
ABERNETHY: You, as I said, you used to work in the financial business. What do your friends there, the friends that you have who’ve worked there ”” what do they tell you about what went wrong; how they feel about it; what they might have done wrong?
Dr. MILLER: Yeah, I work with a group up in Greenwich, Connecticut””we were known as the hedge-fund capital of the world””a group called Greenwich Leadership for people trying to connect their faith and their work and their morals and their values.
Corporations cannot be moral because they are not persons. The only way to make them “moral” is to make the people who benefit from the corporate entity accountable for what the corporation does. However, corporations were actually created to insulate people from the liabilities associated with corporate failures or misdeeds! So, really, by definition corporations are disconnected from accountable people. Also, when corporations earn lots of money for CEOs, officers, employees and shareholders, what is their incentive to make a corporation do good?