Organizations and Markets

Carl Schramm on Ethics

23 January 2007 at 10:24 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Kauffman Foundation president Carl Schramm doesn’t like legislative solutions to business-ethics problems:

The emergence of statutory standards of ethical commercial behavior reflects a belief that fundamental human behavior in the marketplace can be better ordered by government than by honoring and enforcing absolute ethical, shared standards as reflected in the common law. In fact, the substitution of statute and regulations for self-imposed absolute standards may invite further corrupt behavior as statute and regulations tend to parse broad ethical concepts into the minutiae of elements of violations and to articulate the lowest standard of acceptable conduct, if not explicitly, then by means of obfuscatory language.

This from Schramm’s “The High Price of Low Ethics: How Corruption Imperils American Entrepreneurship and Democracy” in the current issue of the Journal of Markets and Morality. (The journal’s site is gated, but a pre-publication version is available here.)

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Classical Liberalism, Management Theory.