Greed

I've always been mystified at how readily the public seemed to swallow the notion that the entire housing crisis, credit crunch, and ensuing recession were caused by greed.

Here is an articulate analogy I got from one of Thomas Sowell's columns: greed is like gravity – it's a fact of life, and blaming greed for anything that is going on now, or indeed anything you don't like in the free market is like blaming gravity for a plane crash.

Sure, if there were no gravity, the plane wouldn't crash; however, we cannot remove gravity from the physical world any more than we can banish greed from human interactions. People are hard-wired to act in their own best interests.

Any sane person's explanation of a plane crash would probably focus on whatever caused the plane to fall from the sky – not on the universal force that hundreds of thousands of flights defy each day.

By the same token, millions of Americans greedily go about their business every day without causing terrible disaster.

All of the routine decisions we make about money each day – choosing which credit card to use, if any, deciding whether to rent or buy a home, searching out the cheapest gas prices (if only by a couple cents), and so on – are properly motivated by the ubiquitous desire to obtain and preserve wealth: in other words, greed.

Therefore, it simply does not stand to reason that greedy behavior can cause major disasters like the subprime mortgage crisis. If it could, crises like this would be commonplace. Instead of labeling the current problem as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, it would merely be the worst since last year.

Clearly, greed fails to explain the whole story, and we should be skeptical of anyone making such claims: either they are misinformed, or they are trying to divert the conversation from the realm of reason to the realm of emotion and gut-reactions.

Here is a funny example of the artful use of rhetoric against greed:

Greed is just one of those words that push people's buttons, and I believe it is invoked to stoke the embers of class warfare in people's minds. Condemning the rich as greedy gives us 'ordinary folk' a false sense of self-righteousness: we might not be as wealthy, but at least we weren't greedy like those jerks on Wall Street.

However, this sort of reasoning, if it can be called that, reeks of jealousy – which is ironic because if we didn't desire more wealth (in other words, if we weren't greedy), we would have no reason to be jealous, or even to care about another person's greed.

For a society that values freedom, we cast an awful lot of blame on the free actions of free people, and that blame does nothing to explain the reality of the situation.

Here is my suggestion: the next time you find yourself in danger of being swayed by the rhetoric of self-righteousness and altruism, stop and ask yourself what your life would be like without the greed of others.

I cannot think of a single (material) thing in my life that I devised and built on my own.

That means other people invented and put together all the things that I enjoy in my day-to-day life, from my computer to my comfy bed and favorite slippers, to my car. The couch I'm sitting on, the clothes I'm wearing, electricity, running water – all possible because of the volition of other people, motivated not by altruism but by the reward that comes from producing something of value.

In short, my life is unfathomably better and easier because of: the resourcefulness that enables people to create, and the greed that motivates them to produce more than they need for themselves.