Archives for Ethics category

BackGround Checks and Balances

Background Check Resources

Whether you’re hiring a CEO, a subcontractor, a babysitter, or even looking for afresh tenant or roommate, you’re taking a big risk. It’s the nature of business unfortunately for people to go to great lengths to misrepresent themselves and thus create the need for background check resources and references.

Avoid doing business with deceptive people with these 5 key factors in mind:

1. Prepare comprehensive histories from vague or misleading responses
2. Filter fact from fiction and deal with dishonest interviewees
3. Deal with legal issues including which questions you can and can’t ask
4. Make a confident, well-researched hiring decision
5. Use waivers that protect you legally during the background check process

Personal References

A personal reference could be anyone whom the candidate happens to know but most expected has never worked for. For landlords or people looking for a nanny for their children the request for references should still be for business references and not personal ones. The landlord-tenant relationship is still a business one as is the relationship between nannies and in-home healthcare workers and their employers. Today, personal references have become among those overused catchphrases that disguises the real work of responsible, effective reference checking. Read more… »

The recent spate of accounting fraud scandals signals the end of an era. Disillusionment and disenchantment with American capitalism may yet lead to a tectonic ideological shift from laissez faire and self regulation to state intervention and regulation. This would be the reversal of a trend dating back to Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the USA. It would also cast some fundamental – and way more ancient – tenets of free-marketry in grave doubt.

Markets are perceived as self-organizing, self-assembling, exchanges of information, goods, and services. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is the sum of all the mechanisms whose interaction gives rise to the optimal allocation of economic resources. The market’s great advantages over central planning are precisely its randomness and its lack of self-awareness.

Market participants go about their egoistic business, trying to maximize their utility, oblivious of the interests and action of all, bar those they interact with directly. Somehow, out of the chaos and clamor, a structure emerges of order and efficiency unmatched. Man is incapable of intentionally producing better outcomes. Thus, any intervention and interference are deemed to be detrimental to the proper functioning of the economy. Read more… »

The recent spate of accounting fraud scandals signals the end of an era. Disillusionment and disenchantment with American capitalism may yet lead to a tectonic ideological shift from laissez faire and self regulation to state intervention and regulation. This would be the reversal of a trend dating back to Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the USA. It would also cast some fundamental – and way more ancient – tenets of free-marketry in grave doubt.

Markets are perceived as self-organizing, self-assembling, exchanges of information, goods, and services. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is the sum of all the mechanisms whose interaction gives rise to the optimal allocation of economic resources. The market’s great advantages over central planning are precisely its randomness and its lack of self-awareness.

Market participants go about their egoistic business, trying to maximize their utility, oblivious of the interests and action of all, bar those they interact with directly. Somehow, out of the chaos and clamor, a structure emerges of order and efficiency unmatched. Man is incapable of intentionally producing better outcomes. Thus, any intervention and interference are deemed to be detrimental to the proper functioning of the economy.

It’s a minor step from this idealized worldview back to the Physiocrats, who preceded Adam Smith, and who propounded the doctrine of “laissez faire, laissez passer” – the hands-off battle cry. Theirs was a natural religion. The market, as an agglomeration of individuals, they thundered, was surely entitled to enjoy the rights and freedoms accorded to each and every person. John Stuart Mill weighed against the state’s involvement in the economy in his influential and exquisitely-timed “Principles of Political Economy”, published in 1848. Read more… »