Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Shop till you drop. In a down economy, merchants and economists are welcoming the excitement around all the consumer activity in the wake of my favorite holiday. I think all that is fine. Stuff gets made, stuff gets sold, people buy stuff, trade stuff, it’s the major engine of our economy and without it, we wouldn’t be able to function as a society.

Then there’s the other part of the story. A man in West Virginia collapses at a Target store and people step over him to get at their Black Friday bargains. He dies. A woman at a Walmart in California pepper-sprays fellow shoppers to clear a path to the Xbox console she wants to buy.

Yes, you have to allow for human frailty or mental illness or whatever. At the same time, these cases point to the challenge a society faces when people don’t feel a human connection to their neighbors and colleagues. If our sense of caring isn’t stronger than our greed or indifference, the simian part of our brain becomes dominant and we do shameful things.

This isn’t a political problem. It’s a human problem.

I grew up in Montreal and used to spend summers at a boys camp in upstate New York near Saranac Lake. So a story about that small town in this morning's paper caught my eye. Apparently, the only store selling clothing and other essentials closed down recently, part of a national chain downsizing, and the community decided to take matters into its own hands. They pooled resources and opened The Community Store.

I like this story for several reasons. First, it shows people finding creative solutions to a problem. Second, it demonstrates the power and centrality of community in commerce. Finally, it gets us back to business at a human scale.

Faced with a challenge - nowhere to buy underwear without driving 50 miles - the good citizens of Saranac Lake invested in themselves. They didn't wait for an outside megastore to come in and save them. In fact, when Wal-Mart explored the idea of moving into the area, they were rebuffed. People chose a creative, entrepreneurial track, taking their destinies into their own hands.

Global corporations have deep pockets to promote their "brand", they can hire local people and provide support for community events, but they are never really "of the community". They are visitors, investors who hope to benefit from their local affiliation. A community resource puts community before profits. It is there to serve the community rather than seeing community service as good PR in the service of maximizing profits. Profits will follow for an organization that provides a needed service, but maximizing profit at the expense of a community doesn’t make a business “better”, just richer. With principled, skilled leadership, the new Community Store could be a model for other communities around the country.

I'm not suggesting that all business has to be small and local. I am saying that a small business that provides a needed service and grows from within the community knows that serving the community is essential to its survival. Such enterprises are more likely to be responsive, responsible and resilient.  It's how early capitalism looked, before the evolution of massive, global enterprises. It's finding a positive path to profits without negative exploitation. Perhaps the future of business can be found in its past. Nothing wrong with that! http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2016756087_saranac14.html

Have you noticed that when someone criticizes the growing imbalance in American incomes, and especially when the subject of excessive compensation of top executives comes up, the mantra you hear is that such thoughts are anti-business, or anti-capitalist? I find this curious. It equates business and capitalism with runaway greed. Does that have to be the case?

Businesses can be creative, productive, and important contributors to the health of a community. They can generate ideas and products that make our lives better. They can provide an environment in which people work and generate value for their communities.  This is the kind of business people usually have in mind when they defend capitalism.

Businesses can also be rapacious, monopolistic, abusive, dishonest, and even criminal enterprises. They can rape a community’s resources, foul the environment, squash creative new enterprises that threaten their hegemony, weaken the economy, manipulate governments at all levels, and generally do a great deal of harm. This is the kind of business people usually have in mind when they criticize the excesses of capitalism.

If you believe in the Gordon Gekko creed that “Greed is Good”, that greed is the only honest emotion, and if you subscribe to the pseudo-Darwinian view that “superior” people, society’s cream, will naturally rise to the top if government will stay out of their way, and inferior people would be best off accepting their status and allowing their betters to run things, you are likely to conflate these opposing views of capitalism and business, and see them as two sides of the same coin. You can’t have creative, positive business without greed and abuse.

On the other hand, if you have tremendous faith in government and no confidence in businesses of any kind, if you have been so burned by private enterprise, or are so jaded by the pervasive Wall Street style greed you see described in daily reports of massive bonuses being given to mediocre corporate titans with failing businesses, you may tend to see all business as bad, and look forward to a day when governments run everything.

Most of us eschew both of these extreme views.

We know there are good, creative, supportive businesses that care about the communities they serve and want to act responsibly. These organizations have enlightened leaders who are motivated by a drive to do great things, to help others, to create the most innovative solutions - not to own six homes, two yachts, three private planes and a huge personal collection of priceless art.

We also know there are the other kinds of businesses - predatory, unproductive, vampires that suck the life and resources out of communities and are led by egomaniacs who believe the world owes them - everything. No matter how much they have, it is never enough. They are gluttons with insatiable appetites, and they will suck their businesses dry.

Is it so hard to develop economic and political policies that reward the one while controlling the excesses of the other? Surely there are leaders out there somewhere who aren’t in the pocket of the vampires. Why are they so hard to find?