And another product which is enjoying increasing demand is our organic water. No fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, our water is strictly organic, and necessary for that complete organic vegetarian diet. Use anything else and run the risk of permanently polluting your body, your precious body, the only one you’ll ever have.

Investment opportunities exist for a limited time. Remember Starbucks? A $30K investment turned into over $30 million. And that’s polluted water, even more expensive to produce. You would use that boat in the previous post to run you from your yacht to the dock.

And PS – these products can be frozen, gently, to standards way over and above the quality of glacier ice, which is contaminated with all variety of materials, including 5,000 year old bodies (yuck!)

I once had a professor who told me that he was too old to do creative work in the sciences any more, but that he could still be known for the caliber and achievement of his students.

But the people who feel that a capitalist enterprise is simply a machine for generating profit, who feel there is no fundamental difference between running an airline or a chain of supermarkets–that I have no respect for.

And you’re right. It is rare.

I’ve written here before about my friend who is a naval architect and the CEO of a major yacht design and construction firm. He has not only designed some novel and superb ships, he has created and grown a company which has built many yachts for many satisfied customers, while employing many workers.

The man could sit down at the drawing board and draw the lines of a high-performance ocean crossing machine of beauty and elegance, but then he went much further, and created and maintained and grew an organization that did this on an industrial scale, hundreds of boats from scores of designs, over a quarter century, amassing a remarkable reputation while competing successfully against many gifted competitors in a highly competitive market. And the final product, a work of art which could challenge the Great World Ocean itself.

There is much more here than just knowing how to build a sailboat. This is metaknowledge of a very high order. He hires naval architects now, and he instructs and supervises them, but he still occasionally draws the lines himself. There is an intense humanity in that.

I’ve admired him since I read an essay by Daniel J. Boorstin (who is excellent) many years ago. The ability to see a need as an opportunity, to solve problems with creativity mixed with a certain daring-do form of courage, to help the lives of both customer and employee, and to profit from it graciously are attributes worth striving for.

This is noble capitalism. And it is rare.

But they’re not all like him.

Business, like government, science, scholarship, sport, even warfare, is a human institution capable of good or evil. But as with any other institution, when it becomes an end in itself, sanctioned and revered by custom and ideology and jealously protected from all criticism and review by those who profit most from its undisciplined growth and application, then it becomes something ugly and corrupt, decadent and foul.

The Kochs and their ilk are not the inheritors of the Tudors of this world, they are their ultimate perversion.

Tudor was just a 22-year-old visionary whiz kid when he dreamt up the scheme to harvest wintertime ice from New England’s ponds and rivers and export it to the tropical French colony of Martinique where it could be used to cool drinks, preserve food and soothe patients suffering from yellow fever.

http://www.history.com/news/the-man-who-shipped-new-england-ice-around-the-world

“Glacier ice is a novelty since it doesn’t actually affect the flavor of the drink,” Curtis told me after his talk. He had brought a slab of glacial ice to the seminar and had it broken down to chill the drinks of those in attendance. “It’s just something that adds to the story of the drink,” he continued. “That popping in the glass? It’s air that’s been entombed since before the Industrial Revolution, so it’s as pure as can be. There is something cool about that.”

http://www.foodrepublic.com/2012/06/14/are-you-cool-enough-iceberg-ice

According to the UN International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction, criminal gangs involved in illegal mining for ice is a major additional threat to glaciers across the globe and putting them at risk from climate change.

http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/293548/20120206/illegal-ice-mining-poses-threat-glaciers-artificial.htm#.U-OYkW3nYRB

With proper management, as in any resource, harvesting can be done in a way that preserves the environment and ensures an endless supply of the resource–although perhaps at lower level.

Of course, that isn’t as profitable, is it?

This falls in with deforestation, though much of that is without permit. It’s simply a matter of selling logs to a mill without needing to show authorization for the initial harvesting.