The Richmond Times Dispatch published my letter to the editor today:

Next Time, Call It 'Duty'
Editor, Times-Dispatch: Your editorial, "Pay," makes a mockery of the virtuous capitalists who run our nation's corporations. You focus on the small number of corporations that failed because of a handful of dishonest men who relied on fraud instead of their intellects.
Perhaps a better title for your editorial would have been, "Duty." You deplore "the terribly bad social policy" of corporations paying their executives what they feel they are worth. "Social policy" is the equivalent of the equally subjective "public good," which is the philosophy of sacrifice to the state that created both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. A corporation's only "duty" is to its shareholders, not to egalitarianism in pay between the clerk who sorts the mail and a CEO such as Jack Welch, who increased the value of GE's stock by almost 3,000 percent.

The Times-Dispatch editorial department is often labeled as conservative. However, the belief in a duty to other men is the key similarity between conservatism and liberalism. Both of these political philosophies view altruism and service to the state as ultimate values (conservatives embrace compulsory service and the draft while liberals support punitive taxes on productive achievement). The truly ultimate value is that which our nation was founded upon: The radical idea of the self-interested individual pursuing his own happiness while keeping the property he has honestly earned. Bob Murphy. richmond.