ShareThisGreed, greed, greed. It's a refrain that is endless these days as liberals especially blame virtually all our problems on this vice supposedly endorsed and amplified by a free market that carries this message: Go for the biggest prize possible, and if decency gets in the way, knock it on the head.
Repeatedly, we are told that CEOs are greedy, that Big Oil is greedy, that anyone who makes a nice profit is greedy and that the answer is for government to curtail commercial liberty while taking from Peter to pay Paul.
Greed does exist -- there are those who seem slavishly devoted to the accumulation of vast amounts of wealth above anything else. It's a self-punishing life choice, in my view, and obviously can have harmful ripple effects, especially if the avarice leads to cheating or abuse of power.
But greed hardly sums up the essence of our economic system, it does not define most of those who are rich, it is not the same thing as enlightened self-interest and it is probably less a negative factor in our society than jealous resentment and a neo-Puritanical aversion to material bounty.
To be sure, self-interest is crucial to a market system in which human freedom and efficiency-producing competition have produced blessings once undreamt of -- wealth that fosters good health, education, enormously expanded knowledge, extensive occupational opportunities, that serves the good of the rest of humanity and lifts people from misery, including those who are officially classified as poor.
Taking their information from government sources, Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson of The Heritage Foundation have reported that the typical poor person in America "has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family's essential needs."
By the standards of many places in the world today and all places in the world not so terribly long ago, these people would be seen as the thieving, greedy rich by the kind of people who placate their own sense of deprivation by blaming those better off and sometimes fiercely want what these other people have, expecting government to steal it for them.
No small number of politicians are wise to this irrational anger, which is why they prattle on about CEO salaries that have no significant economic consequence or Big Oil profits without which these companies could not serve the public as they do. Politicians on the left have been quick to blame greed for the current financial crisis, and while reckless excess was certainly part of the equation, they neglect to mention their own role through laws and policies aimed at assuring mortgage loans to bad risks.
Adding insult to all this injury are the new Puritans, who are just a little bit different from the old ones described by the early 20th century wit H.L. Mencken as people who couldn't stand the thought of anyone anywhere being happy. These Puritans can't stand the thought of anyone anywhere having very much because, well, they don't need it.
But "need" is a funny word -- Henry David Thoreau said about the only shelter we needed was a coffin-sized railroad box, and if that's an exaggeration, it's surely the case that these new Puritans themselves have more than they actually "need."
Today's ubiquitous greed talk is misdirected, forgetting among other things that afflicting the comfortable almost always results in afflicting the afflicted as well, of making everyone worse off. It really ought to end.
(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)
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