Freedom, Responsibility, and Accountability

Tbe institutions charged with articulating legally binding rules defining responsible business practices function in different, but complementary ways. 

Hayek was inspired by his like-minded colleagues at the University of Chicago to write a paper entitled On Being an Economist, in which he pro- 

A Statement of Aims delivered to the press at the end of the meeting announced in ominous tones that [t]he central values of civilization are in danger, because the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared over large stretches of the earth s surface. This worrisome condition was fostered by the growth of a view of history which denies all absolute moral standards and a decline of belief in private property and the competitive market. It warned that without the diffused power and initiative associated with these institutions it is difficult to imagine a society in which freedom may be effectively preserved.  

Concluding that further fully funded meetings of this sort were highly desirable, the participants created a permanent Mont Pelerin Society and elected Hayek president. The Society met again in Switzerland two years later and annually thereafter. Although differences developed among the Society s strong personalities over the years, it eontinued to add to its membership and to meet annually for more than sixty years.  

One of the earliest financial backers of the Laissez Faire Revival, the Volker Fund, was established in 1947 upon the death of the owner of a successful Kansas City dry goods business. It was administered by his nephew, an ardent 

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In response it might be argued that restrictions on the actions of companies should be regarded as restrictions on the actions of the real human persons who own or run them, and that therefore the harm principle can appropriately be applied. However, it is questionable whether a company is the human individuals who own it or run it, and thus that the freedom of these individuals is restricted by restrictions on the company. A case for the identity of a company with particular human individuals can probably be made with respect to small, private companies. In such companies one or a small number of individuals is clearly responsible for what the company does and can be said to be the company. But this case is less easily made for large corporations, owned by anonymous shareholders, where it is difficult to hold to account any particular individuals for the actions of the company.10 In such companies all the key individual human beings may change while the company remains the same company. 

This partition and the subsequent nonequilibrium approach were originally formulated and commonly applied to electronic processes (for example solute electronic transitions) as well as to the evaluation of solute response to external oscillating fields [41], Such phenomena are discussed elsewhere in this book suffice it to say that in these cases the fast term is connected to the polarization of the electron clouds and the slow contribution accounts for all the nuclear degrees of freedom of the solvent molecules. 

As the young adolescent pushes for more freedom, parents need to push the only child to assume certain responsibilities in return, holding their son or daughter accountable for consistency, predictability, and believability. In doing so, they can make a statement of contract that might go as follows ... 

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