Let Me Tell You About Greed

Greed has, for some reason, a very negative connotation.  It has been recognized as a human trait as long as there have been humans. That's right, Mr. Marx, it's been around much longer than "capitalism" has been around and anyone who claims it cannot exist in socialist utopias is delusional. Of course, it is always the other guy that is greedy; never us!  Right?  Well, maybe.

If we were to go any dictionary to look up the meaning of the word, we would get something like "a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed" as the definition.  If we consider this definition a bit, we notice at least a couple of things wrong.  

The first term is "a selfish and excessive desire". "Selfish" implies that the person is motivated by their own self-interests; it reflects an impression that they are the center of their own universe - or at least, close to it.  To tell you the truth, I can't see anything "immoral" about having self-interests.  We are all individuals, after all, with personal desires and ambitions.  And, what about the meaning of "excessive desire"? According to whom?  Why, the one calling the other guy greedy, of course! In other words, it is the accuser who is denouncing someone of having more desire than they have for something that makes the other guy greedy.  In absolute terms, there is no such thing as an excessive desire; there is only desire.  Now, what if the other guy had a selfless and excessive desire to donate to charities?  Would this be greed?  Perhaps, but then you'd have to say that selflessness is actually a form of "enlightened self-interest" and that the excessive desire for something is to be found in what the person perceives he is getting in return by donating.  And now we get to the term, "more of something than is needed".  Again, according to whom?  How can any observer determine how much of something is needed to fulfill another person's desires?  Once more, the measure of quantity here would be a subjective standard set by the accuser and not by an objective norm.

When I was a boy, my father told me that the world revolves around people following their private self-interests and that this was the basis of economy.  It is human desire that turns the wheels of everything, not money.  This idea would be too entailed to describe here, but I will relate an example of this notion.

Tony and The Baseball Cards

When I was a kid in the early 1960's, I had a neighbor named Tony.  He was a few years older than I, but all the kids in the neighborhood collected baseball cards, including Tony.  At the time, my allowance was 25 cents a week.  The baseball cards cost 5 cents a pack and included a flat piece of bubblegum. By the end of the baseball season, most of the kids had at least a shoe box filled with cards from purchases and trading.  Tony always had less cards than the other kids, so he came up with a plan.  He decided to put on his Little League, baseball uniform and go house to house collecting for the League.  He collected, through the enlightened self-interest of the community, more than $5.00 in coins.  He then went to the store and spent the entire amount on baseball cards and came home with 100 packs, which he proudly showed to all of the kids we knew.  When his father asked him where he got this treasure of cards, he hemmed and hawed until the truth was finally revealed.  After his father got done beating the crap out of him, he matched the money that Tony had collected and gave it to the Little League.  He also took all of his cards, including the ones he had before his devious plan, and threw them into the trash. 

Now, what does this story tell us?

Firstly, Tony's desire was not for the money he collected; it was for the baseball cards. The vehicle to fulfill his desire was the money and the mechanism he used to get the money was deception. Looking closely at this, the people who donated fulfilled their desire to feel good about giving something to the neighborhood kids, the store owner made a profit by selling the cards, the card manufacturer and chewing gum factory made their cut, the Little League organization benefited from Tony's father's sense of justice to the tune of $5.00, Tony's father fulfilled his desire to impress upon his son the negative effects of deception and Tony got his ass kicked and was deprived of his ill-gotten cards.  As far as I know, Tony never became a criminal, so maybe he and society benefited, as well. Can't we all acknowledge that these acts of "greed" had a greater, beneficial effect?  Of course, nobody would condone Tony's initial immoral act, but no one could claim that his desire for baseball cards was immoral, either.

What About Corporate Greed?

Most people, especially those who believe in the deceitful, socialist dogma, would look at the profits of business corporations as proof of greed and as a justification of just how unfair the system is.  They're looking in the wrong place and are completely off base; it's got nothing to do with money!  If a person wants to put their convictions to test and boycott any business that turns a profit, they'll wind up standing naked in a field with dirty hair, smelling quite badly and eventually die of hunger! If one really wants to find greed in the business world, one has to merely look at a company's Mission Statement.  

The Mission Statement is the underlying reason for all of the actions of a business; fulfilling its public declarations is the prime mover of the company and the meter for all of the company's managerial decisions.  Monetary profits are merely the barometer by which the company can determine its effectiveness in fulfilling its mission.  A perfect example would be Coca Cola. Its mission is to manufacture, bottle and distribute their beverages.  In a free and open market, they are competing with other beverage manufactures with a similar mission.  The game is to produce and distribute more of their products than the other guy can produce and distribute of his!  In a competitive market, this is why prices come down, because the overall objective is to get more bottles sold.  If their objective was solely based upon income, they wouldn't do it by reducing the price per bottle but by increasing it with no regard for what their competition is doing.  When their competitors start seeing increased sales of Coke, they then respond by reducing their prices to adjust.  In these cases, money is merely the measure of the effectiveness of management decisions over time. Of course, this is not to say that the owners and shareholders of Coke aren't interested in profits, but the point is that the consumer, by having a choice and paying less for their products, is the beneficiary of their "corporate greed".  In addition, Coca Cola does not take your money out of your pocket against your will by force; you hand it over voluntarily because you believe that the benefit of drinking their product is more desirable than having that change in your pocket!

So, to sum it up, greed is neither good nor bad, but remember Tony.  Human desire can only be considered immoral if there are deceptive or coercive means to arrive at satisfying that desire.  We call that "criminal".  However, not all crimes committed in the pursuit of satisfying one's private self-interests are immoral. Whenever a government passes a law which violates the People's natural rights, usually to "protect us from ourselves", breaking them to fulfill a choice to express someone's free will would hardly count as immoral. Keep in mind the Corn Laws in 19th Century England and the Volstead Act enforcing prohibition in the U.S.. Even if that desire is self-destructive to the individual, it ain't my business!  Neither is someone else's "greed".

I'll leave you with a quote from Marcus Licinius Crassus, "Greed is but a word jealous men inflict upon the ambitious."  Ah, quei romani antichi!