Method in the Meanness
Nevertheless, in almost any discussion of A Christmas Carol, there’s almost always someone who sticks up for Scrooge.
    True, he wasn’t the kind of guy you’d want to work for — “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!” Scrooge reserved extra cash “to support the prisons and the workhouses.” Told that “many would rather die,” he replied, “They had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
     Few would agree with him (or admit it if they did). A few weeks after announcing he would donate a billion dollars to the United Nations, Ted Turner suggested an “Ebenezer Scrooge prize” for the world’s biggest tightwad. Rich people, he added, will “be hearing from me about giving more money away.”
     But others might call Scrooge progressive, promoting population control, fossil-fuel conservation and free-market economics.
     “In Defense of Scrooge,” an Aspen Times 1994 editorial asserted that Cratchit had too many kids and probably wasn’t worth more than the 15 shillings Scrooge paid him. In fact, concluded author Michael Levin, Scrooge was a sweetheart in his own way: “an entrepreneur whose ideas and practices [benefited] his employees, society at large, and himself.”
     And an enterprise called Capitalism Inc. even reportedly sells Christmas cards titled “Ebenezer Scrooge was a virtuous man.”

What Do You Think?
Was Scrooge a practical businessman, paragon of thrift and conscientious practitioner of capitalist ideology — or just cheap, mean-spirited and miserable? To decide, why not look at the precepts he lived by:

Tips From Scrooge

1. Be trustworthy. “Scrooge’s name was good … for anything he chose to put his hand to.” He was always dependable, never a hypocrite.     Author Daniel B. Klein wrote in Issues in Ethics that “consumers demand trustworthiness, and entrepreneurs profit from supplying what consumers demand.” Undependable businesses and products eventually disappear, but a solid reputation “is a service businesspeople can make a profit from.”

2. Know your real job. “You were always a good man of business, Jacob,” Scrooge told the ghost of his former partner.      “‘Business!’ cried the ghost, wringing his hands. ‘Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence were all my business.”

3. Define your goals. Money can convey a sense of well-being, comfort, friends, influence and enjoyment. But sometimes those objectives get lost in the pursuit.     Scrooge says his former master, Fezziwig, had the power to “make our service light or burdensome, a pleasure or a toil. … The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”

4. Apply your knowledge. “If you have ought to teach me, let me profit by it,” Scrooge implored the Ghost of Christmas Present.     Obviously a busy man with many demands on his time, Scrooge intended to make the most of his “training” and apply it to his situation.

5. Keep your balance. The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come let Scrooge glimpse his neglected grave and nearby “mourners.”      “‘[If he’d been more generous], he’d have had somebody to look after him when he was struck with Death, instead of lying gasping out his last there, alone by himself.’”      But Scrooge was spared. Promising that he would “live in the Past, the Present, and the Future [and] not shut out the lessons that they teach,” Scrooge woke in his own room, and “the Time before him was his own, to make amends in.”

An editor since the age of 6, when she returned a love letter with corrections marked in red, Mary Campbell writes and edits for the University of Arizona College of Business and Public Administration and for dozens of entrepreneurs, publishers, and authors. She is editor of the midsize-business journal The FINOVA Quarterly.