Some People Are Purely Greedy…

Disease: Some people are purely greedy and care nothing about others.

Cure: Capitalism limits how much money people can make. [ed: depending on your style of capitalism we guess]

Imagine the greediest person you know. For this story’s purpose, his name is John. If John carried a gun and there were no laws, John would rob everyone they came across in order to acquire all the wealth he could possibly amass. In an economic system where the government has control over how the economy operates, John could form an alliance with government officials who could pass rules to force people, or entice people, to purchase items only from him. He would be able to use force, with the help of government, to give himself an advantage over other citizens.

Now place John into a capitalist system where individuals are free to produce and consume as they choose and where private property rights are protected by law (John can’t use a gun!). In a capitalist system the government will not step in to help John acquire his wealth by establishing an advantage over others. Since John can’t rob people to acquire wealth and since he can’t have government officials move him to the front line, how will he satisfy is greedy impulses?

In a capitalist system where the only exchanges are voluntary exchanges, John can satisfy his greed-demon only one way: He needs to find something he can make and sell that enough people want to buy so that he can amass a fortune. The beautiful part is that even though John is rotten on the inside, every dollar he generates comes from someone buying something he sold them that they needed or wanted.

The engine of capitalism that creates wealth and opportunity for all is driven by the purpose of each and every individual. Some may be greedy, some may wish only to help, some may be hedonists and some may have no particular agenda at all. Whatever their motivations, whatever their purpose, in a capitalist system the only way they can fulfill their purpose is to produce or provide something that someone else wants to have. Capitalism establishes a system where an evil person cannot gain an advantage over a decent person. Capitalism neutralizes the disease of greed within a society by not permitting the greedy person to gain an advantage over decent, caring people.

5 comments

    1. Greg,
      A subsidy is not illegal. By definition, it is written in to the law. A corporation can’t commit malfeasance by taking advantage of it. A tax loophole is also not illegal. It is a failure of the tax code itself and can be closed only by a legislative act. A corporation (or individual) doesn’t commit malfeasance by taking advantage of it. I don’t know what you mean by a tax “dodge.” If a corporation actually fails to pay its taxes, that is illegal and the corporation can and should be punished for it. I also don’t know what you mean by “other forms of corporate malfeasance.” Certainly greedy and unscrupulous people own and operate various corporations. Those people should be held accountable when the break the law. But you shouldn’t slander corporations for using the law to their benefit. I went to a liberal law school. My liberal tax law professor started our first class by saying this, “It is your job as a tax attorney to find the loophole for you client and save him money.” That was enlightening to me. If the law is the problem, fix the law. Don’t lump “corporations” into a grimy pot of evil-doers.

      1. We can identify the bug in the system.

        ” A tax loophole is also not illegal. It is a failure of the tax code itself and can be closed only by a legislative act.”

        1. Tax loopholes largely benefit corporations.
        2. The closing of tax loopholes is done via Legislative acts that are executed by legislatures.
        3. The greatest predictor of who will be a legislator is the amount of money behind their campaign.
        4. Over half of the money contributed to political campaigns in the U.S. comes from corporations in the top five sectors of industry.

        5. Therefore, it is highly likely that our legislators are bought and paid for by corporations, and thus, legislate to benefit those corporations.

  1. This is nice … as far as self-supporting thought experiments go. However, you might need to revisit your assumptions sometime.
    1) Greed is not a disease, nor is anyone “purely greedy”, save those with sociopathic character disorders, and they seem to have an alarming penchant to become CEOs and Politicians. Notice please that both positions ‘inoculate’ those individuals from accountability from the ‘capitalist’ cure.
    2) The view of capitalism as a series of voluntary transactions is rather naive, at best. A transaction can only be voluntary to the degree that both parties are un-coerced in it’s engagement. At least the transaction has to be honest. Rarely are they anymore. I shouldn’t have to explain further, but if you’d like to do your own research libraries are filled with books explaining exactly what I’m talking about. You could do worse than start with Marx’s ‘Das Capital’, just ignore the communist psuedo-predictions and the anti-semitism.
    3) Your example shows a strong tendency to confuse economic systems with governmental systems, such that government exists to defend the sanctity of economy. You suggest that John, with his gun, could make a deal with the government to aid him in stealing everybody else’s stuff. The only place in the modern world where that’s true is the US. (How else would you interpret “Too big to fail?)

    To piggyback off of Greg’s concerns, to steal money in the US one doesn’t need a gun. All one needs is the protection from consequence of action, a *limited liability* for lies, coercion and theft. All one needs is an LLC. Margaret Thatcher once famously said “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”. That’s a very toothsome sound bite, and not founded on any good economic principle at all. What it’s founded on is a fearful view of human nature, that if people don’t have to produce and create, they won’t. So, all the generation of wealth (capital) will lay in the hands of the few good people who defy that human nature, the capitalists, the job creators, the John Galts. The fact that those latter people even exist, as well as your thought experiment here, shows the rather privileged lie behind that thinking. In America, we’ve taken that lie to extreme levels, where we see fit to force people to support capital growth for the ‘job creators’ if they want to even survive, lazy bastards that people are. Hardly the view of the land of opportunity you were shooting for, isn’t it?

    I would contend, given the ‘Murkin attitude, that the trouble with capitalism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money to steal. Corporations move their ‘headquarters’ to empty offices in Switzerland so that they avoid paying taxes used for covering the health care of the very people they pay so little that those folk can’t even afford the corporations product. Hedgefunders ‘invest’ in companies to the point of ownership, break them up and sell the assets at huge profit to the opportunistic overseas, and completely violate the “fair” deal they had with American workers to “trade” labor for fair pay. For decades, we have sent American military might to defend ‘free market’ capitalist profit, at the expense of those of us who had no say whatsoever in that ‘transaction’. To protect ‘capitalism’ our government continues to escalate the $1.6 trillion (and growing) boondoggle that is the F-35 fighter jet, with support only from those companies profiting and increasingly small numbers of folk in the Pentagon who are looking to ‘fair trade’ themselves into a wealthy retirement as ‘consultants’. That is exactly the coercion through violence you claim capitalism will protect us from and yet it can’t even remotely. You can try, but you will not convince me that that form of governmental supported capitalism is anything but theft.

    Don’t get me wrong, and kindly avoid the almost inevitable Ad Hominems. I like capitalism as long as two conditions are met. 1) Government does it’s job which is to protect and defend the well being of the people, the society. Ours is not, and even ‘rational’ Republicans aren’t moving in anything like the right direction. 2) The unfettered greed of Johncorp LLC and his little gun are countered by strict government control and taxation such that certain social (socialist) conditions are met. Infrastructure, defense, communication, civil/labor rights and health care should all be considered the first priority of an elected group of bodies.

    Before you hit me with the tl;dr, please consider that this is the very brief version of what’s problematic with your post.

  2. If it were only that simple. The purely greedy find other ways to scam their way to defraud others with bogus claims and promises – snake oil salesmen. They do not keep all of their cost of production and dump toxic waste on their neighbors – polluters. They exploited children and others who are desperate – child labor and company stores. There are lots of ways that the purely greedy have taken advantage. Then comes government to put in rules so “John can’t use his gun”. And we get to where we are today. While you may think that our laws were just passed because government is corrupt and is giving pay-backs to their buddies that is rarely were these have come from. And capitalism actually does little to stop the purely greedy. Let the buyer beware is not a solution to those who are truly manipulative. So we have disclosure and licensing to ensure basic standards are met. Stopping John with his gun just opens Pandora’s box of government. The purely greedy never rely on purely voluntary transactions.

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