Free Republic

While Ted Turner was in college, his father wrote him a letter that concluded: "I think you are rapidly becoming a jackass." Anyone who has watched the eccentric billionaire over the years might be inclined to admire Dad's prescience.... Far from self-made, Mr. Turner inherited a large billboard business when his father, with whom he had a troubled relationship, committed suicide.... He had been less lucky in 1985 when, without consulting his board, he bought MGM for $1.5 billion. He overpaid and was drowning in debt. Three months later he sold the studio back at a discount. More damaging, he...

Ted Turner, hard of hearing and approaching his 64th birthday, has got his groove back. The billionaire "Mouth of the South," who spent much of last year demoralized and complaining about having been fired, is now looking much more like the corporate rabble-rouser he used to be. "A great leader has two key qualities," Turner said in a speech this month at the University of Rochester in New York. "He knows where he wants to go; he's able to persuade others to go with him." After a year of virtual corporate exile, Turner has figured out the first part and...

The corporate world is now embroiled in two controversies. There's the fraud at Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, and elsewhere; and there's the payment of absurd sums to CEOs. Both developments threaten the free-market system--you're kidding yourself if you don't think that big firms deliberately duping investors, or CEOs awarding themselves hundreds of millions of dollars that should have gone to stockholders, does anything other than erode the reputation of market economics. Both practices also trample important principles of conservative economics, as we'll see in a moment. But the two controversies really aren't separate--they are one and the same. The motive...