Consider the things that have most improved human life: the medicines and the harvests, the tools and the teachers, the ways of getting from here to there, the thousand small conveniences we have stopped being amazed by. Almost every one of them reached you through a company. A business, built well, is among the most powerful instruments for good ever devised -- a way to serve an enormous number of people, every day, at a price they can bear. We begin here because it is easy to forget, and because forgetting it has cost us dearly.
There is a worn story about business and ethics. In it, business is a hungry thing, and ethics is the leash. We are told that left alone, enterprise will take everything it can, and that decency is something forced onto it from the outside -- by regulators, by shame, by a conscience it would rather not have. It is a tidy story. It is also wrong.
Strip a great business down to what actually makes it great, and you do not find greed cleverly managed. You find a group of people who found a better way to serve someone. A product that does the job. A service people trust. A price that is fair because the value is real. Meeting a need well is not a compromise of virtue. It is the virtue. A market is just people, and to serve people better is good work -- some of the most honest work there is.
It is incumbent upon each one of you to engage in some occupation. We have exalted your engagement in such work to the rank of worship of the one true God.
So if profit is not the corruption, what is? The corruption is coercion. It is when a business stops trying to win your choice and reaches instead for the force of government to take the choice away -- to kill its competitors by law rather than by service, to rig the game, to extract rather than earn. Rent-seeking, regulatory capture, the cozy deal that locks out the upstart: that is the real betrayal of enterprise. Not the profit. The profit honestly earned in open competition is the proof that you served someone better than the alternative.
This is why we are not embarrassed by wealth, and we will not ask you to be. Wealth built through real work -- through crafts and professions, through serving people who chose you -- is, in the plain words of Baha'u'llah, "commendable and praiseworthy." The builder who creates value and prospers has done a good thing, not a thing to be excused.
Such wealth as a man acquireth through crafts and professions is commendable and praiseworthy in the estimation of men of wisdom.
And then there is the question everyone reaches eventually: what about those who have little? Here the honest answer is not to seize, but to give -- and to mean it. When Andrew Carnegie sent 'Abdu'l-Baha his essay on wealth, the reply did not call for the rich to be stripped by force. It called for voluntary sharing, and named it a greater thing than the forced equalization of wealth, because sharing freely chosen is an act of the soul in a way that confiscation never can be. "It is not well," 'Abdu'l-Baha wrote, "that the poor should coerce the rich." Generosity that is compelled is just a transaction. Generosity that is chosen is character.
The teachings of Baha'u'llah advocate voluntary sharing, and this is a greater thing than the equalization of wealth. For sharing is a matter of free choice.
We decided to build the community itself on that conviction. Membership here is free and on-tap -- one tap, no gate, no application. If the work serves you and you want to fuel it, you can give. But giving is always a choice, never the price of admission. The thesis, performed: support that is freely given is worth more than support that is required.
That is the company we want to keep. Builders who serve their customers well, compete honestly, earn what they earn without apology, and give because they want to. People who treat trust as the real capital it is. If that is how you already think about your work -- or how you want to -- then you are already one of us. Come build with us.