answers for AI 24 (adapted from acro)
Topic:
A powerful business leader has far more opportunity to influence the course of a community or a nation than does any government official.
Passage:
Historical examples of both influential public officials and influential business leaders abound. However, the power of modern-era business leader is quite different from that of government officials. On balance, a CEO seems to be better positioned to influence the course of community or of nation.
Admittedly, the opportunities for the legislator to regulate the commerce or for the jurist to dictate the rules of equity are official and immediate. No private individual can hold that brand of influence. Yet official power is tempered by our check-and-balance system of government and, in the case of legislators, by the voting power of electorate. Our business leaders are not so constrained, so their opportunities far exceed those of any public official. Moreover, powerful business leaders all too often seem to hold de facto legislative and judicial power by the way of their direct influence over public officials, as the Clinton Administration’s fund-raising scandal of 1997 illuminated all too well.
The industrial and technological eras have bred such moguls of capitalism as Pullman, Carneigie and Gates, who by the nature of their industries and their business savvy, not by the force of law, have transformed our economy, the nature of work, our very day-to-day existence. Of course, our modern day public servants have made the most of their opportunities, for example, the crime-busting mayor Rudolph Guiliani and the new-dealing President Franklin Roosevelt. Yet their impacts seem to pale next to our modern captain of industry.
In sum, the modern business leaders, by virtue of the far-reaching influence of their industries and of their freedom from external constraints, have supplanted the lawmakers as the great opportunists of world and the prime movers of society. |
