GREED! Greed! It’s all the fault of greed! The two major presidential candidates agree, and you can hear the same complaint from other corners too.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said it in Friday night’s debate, saying he “warned about corporate greed and excess.” “But somehow in Washington today — and I’m afraid on Wall Street — greed is rewarded, excess is rewarded, and corruption — or certainly failure to carry out our responsibility is rewarded,” he said, according to a CQ transcript posted online by The New York Times.
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said it on Sept. 21, in Charlotte, N.C., and you can watch an Associated Press video of it on YouTube: “The era of greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street and in Washington has led us to a perilous moment.”
But Wall Street without greed would be like a farm without fertilizer, and the suggestion that the economy should operate without greed is nothing but fertilizer — of the variety supplied freely by politicians and bulls.
Merriam-Webster defines “greed” as “a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed.” The notion of need is echoed in claims that various people earn more money than they or anyone could ever need. But think about what it must mean to have only the money one “needs.” Anyone who can afford a Coke has more money than he needs for a minimal survival. For a good life, we need more, and, as long as it doesn’t cost us something more valuable, the more the better.
Selfishness is a good thing. To be selfish is to desire good things for oneself — money, virtue and knowledge, for example. It doesn’t mean desiring that others lack these things. It means wanting them for oneself. I benefit from the knowledge of others, because I can learn from them. It’s good to be around good people. And in a free society, one makes money by creating goods and services that other people willingly pay for, which means that the way to become rich is to be especially useful to others — and that others’ wealth is both evidence that they have been productive and a means of rewarding you if you are productive.
More importantly, selfishness is the pursuit of happiness. As Ayn Rand taught, being selfish means being your own highest goal, and never sacrificing what you value to others. Part of being selfish is making money in order to use it in ways that enrich your life, including by buying enjoyable things for yourself and assisting people you value. Greed, in the sense of wanting and working to acquire as much material wealth as you can without sacrificing other values that contribute more than money to your own life and happiness, is good.
Someone might object that this is not what he means by greed. It’s not about getting more than one needs, he’d say; it’s about getting more than one deserves. Another dictionary (American Heritage) lends some support to this idea, defining “greed” as “an excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth.”
“Excessive,” here, has to mean excessive in relation to what the person deserves. As Aristotle pointed out, what is excessive for one person is not excessive for another. In the case of money, for example, it is plainly not excessive for a doctor to require more money for his services than a janitor earns. Indeed, a physician who asks only a janitor’s wage would be blameworthy for not demanding what he deserves.
This is because desert in this context is not a matter of a person’s moral character. There are individuals of good and bad moral character in virtually all lines of work. Deserving money is a matter of “making money,” quite literally: of producing the value that the money measures. The only way to determine what money a person deserves is to let him prove it in a free market.
Does that mean that whatever money a person has, that’s what he should have? No. In today’s partly free, partly socialized economy, people often obtain or preserve fortunes through government intervention. And even without government help, someone who acts dishonestly in the market can, at least for a while, gain unearned money. The desire for the unearned is immoral and destructive.
But when politicians denounce greed, they don’t usually make that distinction. That puts the focus on the desire for wealth, which is part of the pursuit of happiness, not on the desire for the unearned. Those who would lead a free society should not denounce the pursuit of happiness or any part of it.
Alexander R. Cohen’s column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily.
He can be reached at a.cohen@cavalierdaily.com.
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