My Grown-Up Christmas List (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

The first Christmas album my husband and I owned on a CD was Amy Grant’s 1992 “Home for Christmas.” We’ve been playing that thing for 24 Christmases now, and one of my favorite songs on it is “Grown-Up Christmas List.”

Grant herself wrote additional lyrics for a song that David Foster had written a couple of years earlier with Linda Thompson-Jenner, and it never fails to make me a little teary: “I’m not a child, but my heart still can dream. … Not for myself, but for a world in need. …”

I thought immediately of that song when a friend shared on Facebook the news that Martin Shkreli had been arrested. “I got my Christmas wish!” he declared.

Shkreli, you know, is the 32-year-old hedge fund manager who became a symbol of heartless greed when the news broke a few months ago that he had bought a pharmaceutical company and immediately jacked up the price on an old but effective anti-parasitic medication from $10.50 to $750 per pill.

There is no law against price gouging by the pharmaceutical industry — in fact, some federal laws seem to encourage it — so Shkreli wasn’t arrested for being a terrible human being. Instead, he was accused of illegally taking stock from a biotech company he had started in 2011, Retrophin Inc., and using the stock to pay off personal debts.

He’s innocent until proven guilty, of course, but it’s not hard to believe that the kind of guy who would proudly and defiantly gouge sick people would be capable of ripping off his investors.

In a sort of karmic echo, the price of stock in KaloBios Pharmaceuticals Inc. — which hired Shkreli as its chairman and CEO in November specifically because he was a heartless profiteer — dropped by more than half when he was arrested.

Karma is not part of my faith, but there is something appealing about the idea of misery coming to those who spread misery. So when we see a little weasel like Shkreli under indictment and we see people who knowingly invested in his perverse vision lose value, it feels like the world is just the tiniest little bit better.

Of course, I’d also like to think that good will come to those who do good, even as I am reminded every day that bad things happen to good people. “He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust,” Jesus said, and I grasp the truth of those words more with each passing year.

Amy Grant’s grown-up Christmas list includes wishing “that wars would never start” and “everyone would have a friend.” I can’t argue with those wishes, but I have some that are a bit more specific:

• That 2016 really will be the year when the median income begins to rebound, since the middle class is America’s economic engine;
• That Arkansas ceases to be a place where abuse of the justice system is rewarded;
• That elected officials who allow themselves to be bought off continue to be caught and punished;
• That the people who bribe elected officials are also punished, which hasn’t always been the case; and
• That someone figures out a business model for the news industry that will support the kind of robust reporting staffs of yesteryear. (This may sound selfish, but I genuinely believe that democracy depends on an informed electorate.)

2016 being an election year, my list also includes this standard wish: That anyone who sets out to mislead the public be thwarted. My heart still can dream, right?

This is my last column for 2015. One of the things that is very right in my world is working for a company that shuts down from Christmas through New Year’s Day. Subscribers to Arkansas Business — have I mentioned lately how much I love and appreciate you? — will receive next week the Book of Lists. If you are wise, you will immediately write your name on the front with a fat marker.

May you have a healthy and prosperous 2016.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com, but don’t expect a reply until Jan. 4.