George Bernard Shaw Quotes
It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.
Shaw, George Bernard. "Preface." Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue, Constable and Co., 1924.
This is a common rejoinder of third world country leaders to accusations of Western democracies about corruption. And doubtless it is true. However temptation has never been a good defense of improper behavior.
At the time of this interview there had been a decade of business fraud at many different levels. The regulatory agencies supposedly responsible for the regulation had neither the staff or the political will to even enforce the laws and regulations then in existence and there were many loopholes in those. Many business interests opposed all regulation and strict enforcement as a diminution of the health of the economy. Others, like Greenspan, saw fraud as corrupting the markets themselves and therefore the usual capitalistic economic competitive forces that would control business do not operate with extensive fraud.
At this time it was 6 years after the Home Financing Crisis and the Meltdown of 2008 and despite tens of thousands of law violations by the bank, the Justice Department was finally finishing their investigations and requiring some penalties. Other negotiations with other banks were in progress, but no bank executives were going to jail for the millions they handled fraudulently, whereas a burglar who stole household goods would do jail time.
George Bernard Shaw, known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
