Here's the best advice college grads could possibly get, but is so rarely given to them:

The conclusion is unavoidable: If you have a good education, you shouldn't just consider getting rich. Creating and amassing wealth is an outright moral obligation. Do so and you can take comfort not just in financing public services but in knowing that you are giving people what they need or want, generating jobs and underwriting the affluence that makes art, justice, environmental protection and other social goods possible.

I long for the day when, instead of all the calls to service commencement speakers blather about to grads at Yale or Harvard or Stanford, a speaker peels the ivy right off the walls by saying, simply,"Go out and make tons of money. It's you're moral obligation."

It would almost be worth a lifetime of clandestine leftism just to come out of the free market closet for one brief, shining moment at an elitist university and deliver such a message.

Hat tip: Pieces of Flare.

Jonathan Dresner - 6/16/2004

....as long as you actually pay your fair share of taxes, create jobs that are as good as or better than the prevailing standard, work to make government more responsive and competent rather than swayed by your wealth, provide goods that are needs rather than manufactured desires, produced and advertised responsibly.

There is wealth that is earned and used productively, there is wealth that is collected and squandered foolishly (which isn't bad for the economy, short term) and there is wealth that is created and used corrosively, degradingly, destructively.