[Editor Note: Just in time for Global Divestment Day, Professor Richard Ebeling offers a worldview of the philosophical basis of private property and voluntary exchange–human freedom–for the public policy debate.]

In American culture there is one persistent villain portrayed as the enemy of humanity, the perpetrator of deception, and the agent for social corruption and human harm: the businessman.

Whether in news commentaries or on the movie screen, the businessman is presented as a heartless, greedy manipulator so concerned with squeezing the last possible dollar out of anything he does, that he is willing to destroy the planet, kill his competitors, poison little children, and sell his own mother “down the river” if it will serve his material and financial purposes.

The only thing that saves us from the end of the world at the hands of these criminal private enterprisers is either some righteous individual who refuses to “take it any more” or the virtuous hand of a government agent dedicated to protecting mankind from those who, clearly, care nothing for the common good of humanity.…