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What I really like about Donald Trump is that people either love him or hate him. You’re either a Rosie O’Donnell or one of the suck ups in “The Apprentice”. (I guess I’m more like the suck ups.) Mother Teresa, on the other hand, doesn’ t inspire this sort of polarization. You could probably make the eighth deadly sin: Not Liking Mother Teresa. How could you not like Mother Teresa? She was literally a saint!

I bet if you polled people and asked them their image of someone who did a great amount of good with her life, quite a few would respond with Mother Teresa.

All of us know of Mother Teresa’s daily search for the poorest of Calcutta’s poor. Even when elderly and feeble, every morning she went out into the worst sections of the city to round up people whose lives were literally better than dogs. I have no idea of how many people she helped, but I bet it was in the thousands.

Mother Teresa not only helped many people she did so selflessly. She was a nun and had taken a vow of poverty. It wasn’t about her; it was about what God wanted her to do.

In our culture, the idea of helping others selflessly, i. e. not getting anything material out of it, is a powerful meme. For instance every time I hear a U-2 song on the radio it seems the announcer has to add a comment about Bono’s charity work. Now, Bono as an activist is not as potent an image as Mother Teresa as a saint, mainly because Bono is rich (really, really rich), and Mother Teresa was poor. Although Bono doesn’t get anything material out of his charity work, he hasn’t given himself body and soul to the wretched–he’s only partially invested, as it were. But still, the fact that he does all of this without recompense is why we place him on such a pedestal.

I think it all revolves around this idea of giving without getting, in other words, selfless altruism.

Both Mother Teresa and Bono can be called altruistic. Since Mother Teresa rejected material wealth, we see her as even more worthy than Bono.

What if you were really interested in the good of others, however, and didn’t care how that good was arrived at, nor who that good was created by? Are the Mother Teresas of the world and the Bonos of the world the only ones creating a lot of good for others with their lives? Obviously not.

Doctors create a lot of good, and also get paid for it. We hold them in high esteem, but that esteem is tainted with the fact that they make a very good income out of saving our lives and reducing our misery.

Businesses create enormous good, but very few look at corporations, for instance, and talk about how much they do for us. Let me tell you something, without the pharmaceutical industry, I would be dead. I would actually have died many times. I probably would not have made it out of childhood.

Sometimes I’ll ask a classroom of students I teach to raise their hands if they’ve ever had strep throat or pneumonia. About three fourths of their hands go up.

“Did you take anti-biotics?” is the next question. Obviously all of the hands stay up.

“Where did the anti-biotics come from?”

Sometimes (not often), a bright student says that a doctor invented them. “You know that dude who invented penicillin.”

“Alexander Flemming,” I respond.

Then I usually ask a particular student if her mother knew Alexander Flemming. Of course I get quizzical looks. I clarify by asking who did the student’s mother buy the actual antibiotic from? The answer’s usually CVS or Eckerd’s, the two main pharmacies in the United States.

I think it’s pretty clear where I’m going with this. Alexander Flemming did indeed invent or discover penicillin, but my mother, for instance, could have never bought the actually penicillin that might well have saved my life when I was sick as a kid from him because she didn’t know him. Not one, but a series of corporations had to make the drug and distribute it before it could get into the hands of the millions of people who needed it. Yes, Alexander Flemming invented the drug, but it would have done very few people any good if they could not have acquired it.

We don’t usually look at CVS, Eckerd’s, the pharmacies at your local chain grocery store or (God Forbid!) Wal-Mart, as altruistic institutions. When you drive by a CVS, you don’t get a knot at the base of your throat coupled with a tearing of the eyes and a feeling of unworthiness mixed with guilt–approximately the feelings we have when we see a picture of Mother Teresa.

Rightly so! Those businesses sell drugs because they’re profitable, not because they do so much good for so many people.

What’s missing in most people’s thought process, though, is that the drugs are profitable because they do good! We want stuff that saves our lives and saves our children’s lives, and we’re willing to pay for it. Without business, without capitalism, we would not have these life saving drugs.

Okay, so I’ve made the point about CVS, and maybe you can swallow, or just not gag on the idea that, although inadvertently, CVS does an enormous amount of good. They and others like them sell drugs that keep millions well and alive. But what about businesses that sell things that are not so obviously necessary?

Now we get to one of my favorite people, Donald Trump.

Donald is admired because he’s brash, rich, and has great looking girlfriends and wives despite his bad hair. He’s also loathed because he’s brash, rich, and has great looking girlfriends and wives despite his bad hair.

Donald makes a lot of money. More power to him! Do you know how he does that? Well, skipping the details, he does this by providing goods and services that the rest of us are willing to pay for. If you want to know more about him, click here.

I’m not sure how many properties Donald has, but I suspect the number of people he keeps employed is in the thousands. In my book having a job and providing for yourself and your family is good. Entrepreneurs create jobs.

It doesn’t stop there, though. Most of the money Donald’s employees make is spent. That money goes to pay for housing, groceries, doctors, various retail stores, movie theaters, a whole host of internet businesses. In other words there is a multiplier effect on the number of people Donald’s jobs affect. An economist could explain this better than I can, but I suspect when you trace the money made working for Donald, the people who are positively affected number in the hundreds of thousands.

Wait there’s more!

Donald borrows a lot of money. According to Wikipedia, at one time he owed 900 million dollars personally! That’s millions and millions of dollars of interest that go to banks and investors, thus affecting thousands and thousands more. (Where do you think the money comes from that the bank uses to pay its employees?)

If you put a picture of Donald next to a picture of Mother Teresa and ask people to point to the saint, no one is going to point to Donald!

If, however, you look at this a little more rationally and compare the number of people each affects in a positive way (makes their lives better), Mother Teresa might not come out in front.

Let’s look at this another way.

Personally I think what Mother Teresa did was remarkable. I would not be able to devote my life to the wretched. I just couldn’t deal with it! One an individual level, you can’t really measure the benefit of saving a human being from that sort of misery. What would be better, though, helping individuals who are wretched and living like dogs on the streets of Calcutta, or solving the whole problem of crushing poverty that put them there in the first place?

Actually, you need both. Any institutional change is going to take time and won’t help, say, a certain eight year old girl who might not make it to her ninth birthday. So help right now, directed at saving specific individuals, is certainly needed. Mother Teresa and her legacy is needed.

But Mother Teresa is not enough.

India needs more Donald Trumps!

India needs more capitalism!

What’s interesting is that, from what I hear from Indian friends, India is in the midst of a capitalist boom. The computer industry is transforming whole cities, Hyderabad, for instance. The IT industry is transforming the whole city. Where you once had sleepy (and very poor) Indian villages, you now have subdivisions full of yuppies driving BMWs.

Capitalism, and capitalists, don’t inspire the admiration that the Mother Teresas of the world inspire. (They should!) The Mother Teresas of the world certainly can help desperate individuals. Capitalists, on the other hand, can create a society and economy where desperate poverty no longer exists.

I like Mother Teresa, but between the two (her and Donald), I’ll vote for Saint Donald any day.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 11:25 am and is filed under Ranting, Self-help, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.