Octave Mirbeau Quotes
To take something from a person and keep it for oneself: that is robbery. To take something from one person and then turn it over to another in exchange for as much money as you can get: that is business. Robbery is so much more stupid, since it is satisfied with a single, frequently dangerous profit; whereas in business it can be doubled without danger.
Mirbeau, Octave. The Torture Garden. Translated by Alvah C. Bessie, Claude Kendall, 1931.
Interest is forbidden in all transaction, both business and personal.
There were few if any consumer protection laws in those days and many wealthy aristocrats made their money by taking advantage of the poor. They were the landowners, bankers, financiers and often the industrialists. Shaw was a sarcastic social critic and this is a typical line he gave his upper class characters. Today, we have more controls on business and finance, and many wealthy business people have gotten that way by providing great value to the consumers and being honest. However, we still have large numbers of wealthy members of society who do make their money from the poor and middle class by unethical and often illegal means. In the aftermath of the Meltdown of 2008. hundreds of thousands of the homes of the working poor and middle class were foreclosed by the major banks forging the legal documentation for the foreclusures. Millions of consumer contracts are issued that even a PhD cannot understand the terms of without special legal and financial training. There is even a legal definition of a salesperson lying to make a sale which is so commonplace that our law excuses it and calls it "puffing". However, there has been over time, improvement over Shaw's era.
See Oliver Stone {625339} for a modern, popular culture, icon of this idea. Several years after this interview, Black, with business interests in several countries, was convicted and served a jail sentence in the United States for fraud. His greed got the best of him.
At the time, Ambani was the richest man in India. Almost all of the great business developers have objectives far more than making money.
Octave Mirbeau was a French novelist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, journalist, and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, while still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde with highly transgressive novels that explored violence, abuse and psychological detachment. His work has been translated into thirty languages.
