As a prologue to this article let me first tell the reader I am not anti-capitalist nor anything close to communist in my thinking, politically speaking. I am a big fan of Liberty, Freedom and Democracy. I do have my theories on the meaning and value of Capital itself so I would probably arrive at a different definition of Capitalism in order to reconcile my own beliefs and to improve on the current definitions. So when I mention Capitalism, it is referring to the current practices and observed results, not the ideal version I envision.
Greed can be said to be an overzealous desire to possess the assets of one or another type of wealth. Entertaining a personal fantasy or having a daydream is generally fairly harmless. However, the illusion of wealth and ownership leads entire masses of humanity mindlessly around by the nose and the mechanisms of Capitalism (as practiced) in particular operate so far out of the laws of biology and physical reality that they threaten our very existence. One of the most counter-nature parts of the Capitalism is the almighty Return on Investment (ROI). Shareholders have come to expect year on year growth of 10% or greater and companies will do almost anything to provide that.
Most commonly they will try:
Now these all seem perfectly normal in business and we have allowed this to become the norm to an every-increasing extent, regularly praising companies for meeting or exceeding expectations. However, it’s not sustainable in many cases. So often, profits are geared toward short-term goals and the long-term is swept under the rug with “we’ll figure it out later.” This runs into a hard wall eventually, one that is built by ancient biology and a finite Biosphere on a finite, closed-system Planet. Consequences of unregulated growth are not unlike cancer, which is unregulated growth in the body.
We are so enamored of this system that we will let companies who pretend to own Cosmic Resources, for example—ancient pre-human fossil oil, and sell it all over the world, including to support unregulated military activity and proceed to alter the chemistry of our atmosphere at great cost and peril. These sort of global commodities are ripe for manipulation and collusion and greed often leads to near extortion level price fixing, gouging and profiteering in the guise of “supply and demand.” Greed generally assures that price rise accelerates and price drop decelerates. Indeed, this particular commodity has been marketed and supported to the level of complete dependency, even addiction so this gives greed another lever to pull. Simultaneously, first oil barons then conglomerates have worked assiduously to suppress alternatives and downplay known dangers of carbonizing the atmosphere, fully playing all the bad greed cards.
Or, on a more personal level, we freely allow pharmaceutical companies to pursue drugs that will either create lifelong dependencies or withhold cures because it would threaten the ROI for investors. So we have a system founded on a huge conflict of interest between profitability and doing what is right and what will lead to less suffering, both physically and financially. Of course, if these companies were guided by higher principles and could learn to live sustainably within our means, we wouldn’t all be vulnerable to extinction at worst and misery at best in the name of Greed for more, more, more.
Bad Greed eventually leads to decay, conflict, often in the form of extreme violence, including war.
Here is a list of bad sorts of greed that are dangerous and unsustainable:
Can greed be good too? What of greed for other types of wealth? Let me list some pros and cons next to each type and encourage the reader to think of more examples:
Good greed is simply a strong desire to possess that which will improve character, knowledge and/or help improve the lives of those around you near or far. It is essentially an obsession to do Good.
A Conflict of Interest arises when a party working toward a certain goal has an ancillary goal to satisfy as well and where satisfying both goals is impossible as one goal may preclude the achievement of the other. The most pervasive and impactful example of this can be found in our Healthcare System but there are endless examples. For example, if one’s goal is to find a cure for a particular malady AND to maximize one’s profit in doing so it can quickly lead to a situation where it is less profitable to cure the malady.
Take Diabetes. Selling a lifetime supply of needles, blood measuring devices, insulin and other drugs as well as all the attendant products and services of associated maladies like obesity, amputations, etc. produces far more revenue than a one time cure would produce so the business is de-incentivized to produce the cure. Or, if a cure or excellent treatment does not involve expensive, FDA approved pharmaceuticals but instead could be as well or better treated with readily available nutrition/diet changes or cheaply produced natural remedies, it won’t garner the research money to prove the efficacy because in the end, not enough imaginary money will be gained.
The Government is filled with such conflicts of interest where the needs of the many are superseded by the needs of the few. And because we have a powerful Senatorial Body where small populations are represented at the same level as large populations, the small populations can lord over the large ones in ways that conflict with the needs of tens of millions of people vs. the needs of thousands, even when the needs of the larger population coincide with those of the smaller population that doesn’t understand it or wants to go its own way regardless of reason. In fact, the Government is one big conflict machine almost rarely doing what is in the actual interest of the Nation in order to satisfy various factions within.
When the government outsources its functions to private business, the potential for conflict of interest soars where it’s profit vs. societal needs. A prime example of this is the privatization of prisons whereby the owners of the private prisons garner more profits from more prisoners whereas if run by the government, fewer prisoners would be less costly and thus more desirable. This inevitably leads to corruption and graft where people, mostly of lesser means, are funneled in greater numbers than is merited into incarceration and for longer sentences than are just, often increasing the likelihood of recidivism and thus perpetuating the privatized profit.
Not all conflicts of interest derive from greed but rather from circumstance. Lawyers and therapists and all sorts of professions often need to recuse themselves from cases or patients where it could create a conflict of violate the rights of another client or patient. Such conscientious deconfliction indicates a much higher mindset compared to the greed-driven decision to place corporate shareholder returns above the needs of patients or citizens.
Sometimes it helps to analyze things entirely regarding how absurd they seem and how disproportionate and downright bizarre they appear. This serves the purpose to diminish the validity of taking the absurd thing seriously. Extreme wealth and extreme greed are ripe for such analysis, especially when put in a Natural context. For example, let’s say we live on average 80 years x 365 days x 3 meals per day = 87,600 meals in a lifetime (counting the breastfeeding). If we paid $100 dollars for each meal, it would add up to $8.7 million. So a billionaire, having paid top dollar for each meal of life, would still have $991 million left to spend. Or let’s say they paid $10 per meal, they could then afford over 1,000 lives worth of food. In Nature, this would be like a lion that hoarded 1000 times the food it could possibly eat, which is absurd. And we have humans who have tens of billions, multiplying this absurdity.
If someone with 1 billion dollars gets a reasonable 5% return on their money annually, they accrue $50 million dollars (which may be taxed) for no activity other than existing (oh, they did call their broker and opened some envelopes, we mustn’t forget). This is a very decent wage of $5,707 dollars/hr., including sleep and weekends! We have individuals who do much better, at 10% return and 50 billion dollars, garnering near $500,000 per/hr. 24 hours per day by breathing. If we ever get our first trillionaire, these wages will rise to 10’s and 100’s of millions per hour. That is absurd.
We see so much hand wringing over minimum wage, the lowest acceptable pay per hour for a worker. Yet we seldom hear about maximum wage, the highest acceptable pay. Why not? The upper limit appears to be infinity if you can get it. We all know the fellow who changes bedpans at the hospital or digs the ditches works just as hard as the broker or the CEO, if not harder. We are extremely impressed with entrepreneurial success such as we see with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and others. But if we fairly examined the causes of their success we find a series of unlikely events and episodes of pure luck as well as the inheritance of all the things society has done to enable it.
Take Amazon, started as an online bookseller. However, if the government hadn’t created ARPANET and then others create the Internet and others invent HTML, all the wiring, modems, routers and computers to do the work on and the teachers Mr. Bezos had growing up, Amazon could never exist. This barely covers the thousands of things that had to fall in place of the course of Mr. Bezos life. One car accident or even a wrong turn and an entirely different outcome. Yes, timing is everything and being first has its advantages but it’s 99.999% luck and .001% talent if we are honest. That talent is fantastic and helps us take advantage of luck but without it, nothing can happen. There were probably a million people born every bit as talented as Mr. Bezos the same year but most of them were probably born in circumstances much less conducive to success or didn’t meet the right people or have access to books, etc.
Basically, we reward good luck and punish bad luck and we cloak luck in the disguise of talent, which is unfair to those with talent who are not as lucky. Any success of an individual must be attributed at least in part to the society they live in that enables it. Society does claim its share of success in the form of taxes but it far undervalues itself as the progenitor of success. This is why, temporarily, wealth taxes and marginal taxes should be much higher — for fairness and to give society what it has rightfully earned. Once society can determine a proper maximum wage, insuring the opulence and philanthropic beneficiaries of wealth overabundance, then proper tax rates can be determined, until they are rendered obsolete. So many fiscal problems can be solved by this simple realization. Eventually, Society will need great capital expenditures to create the Provisional Systems (Cosmic Production) utilizing the Programbility of Matter that can create lasting, sustainable wealth for all inhabitants of Earth. Society will not even technically own these systems for those belong to the Cosmos so if it were to be called an ism it would be Cosmism or Lifism.
There are so many examples of things that the modern person enjoys that not only couldn’t exist in the past, but if they did, would be considered the stuff of kings or wizards. Running hot water, televisions, phones, computers, microwaves, air conditioners, plumbing, shaving cream, deodorants, feminine care products, painkillers, antibiotics, surgery, anaesthesia, sleeping pills, boner pills, cars, trucks, motorcycles, paved roads, supermarkets, Internet, Amazon, drones, lights, stoves, refrigerators, dishwashers, airplanes, and so much more we take for granted. Even in today’s world, due to technological advances, a modern economy model is far fancier and better equipped than yesteryear’s deluxe model. A 2018 Honda Civic is far more advanced than a 1955 Mercedes Benz or Rolls Royce. A 2018 iPhone is so much better than a 1990’s brick phone. A 2018 $1000 computer is far more powerful than a multi-million dollar room-sized computer of the 1950’s.
Moore’s Law states that computing power doubles approximately every 18 months. Yes, based on clever human mental activity, this has been largely the case but because the price does not double and remains fairly constant or even lowers, the value proposition of computers is rising geometrically. Taken to its extreme, this would lead to absurdly powerful supercomputers for pennies on the dollar. As their size also shrinks, supercomputing will become ubiquitous so that even a toothbrush might contain a more powerful computer than was available to crack the Enigma code during WW2. Such a toothbrush could analyze your health and vibrate freshly minted classical music into your teeth as you brushed.
If one extrapolates this process to its logical conclusion, we end up with the best things for no cost or at least very good things for a much lower cost. This shows you that the real value comes from the mind and not the ground. It is only when we apply our minds that we improve the processes, add efficiencies and lower the cost. There seems to be no known limit to how much our minds can lower costs and improve things. Take medicine, for example. Treating a patient with cancer with expensive surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation and recovery could easily be replaced in the future with a “shot” that easily cured the cancer and cut out all the other expensive steps. Sure, because of patents, the initial cost of such a shot could be arbitrarily high but as patents expire, generics are created and competition takes over, the cost comes way down. And the real cure is free because auxons can eventually make the “magic” serum with no human labor.
Cars will become so advanced very soon that they drive themselves, essentially a human delivery system. And thus the concept of car ownership will make less and less sense because who wants a car taking up space when what you actually want is a car when you need it? Cars on demand will be the norm and they will be flying cars too!
Life in the 1800’s, even if you lived in a mansion was cold, smelly, lonely, dark at night, dangerous if you got sick and you generally died by 50. Now, a poor person living in a small house has a phone, access to a clinic, lights at night, flushing toilets. What has changed? The ingenious human mind has changed the human condition in ways that can’t be priced out. What’s 30 more years of life worth? The Future will only come at us faster from here out. Changes will accelerate and by the time the 22nd Century arrives, the 1900’s and the 2000’s will seem quaint and arduous in comparison. Andrew Carnegie noted the general improvement of baseline conditions over the centuries as proof the capitalism was good.
Even when we compare poor people from one nation to another, there can be stark differences. A poor person in America is generally far wealthier than one living in the slums of Calcutta or starving in remote Ethiopia. So material wealth is currently somewhat relative. This relativity can be applied locally, at a national level or internationally depending on what one wants to know about the poverty. As I stated earlier, mental wealth can in some instances overcome lack material wealth so it’s important not to compare apples to oranges when investigating differences. There could be entire neighborhoods in materially wealthy America where the houses are big but the occupants feel small, need all sorts of pills and are generally unhappy so it would seem somewhat of an impoverished area in regards to mental wealth.
Greed is optional, both for individuals and for businesses. Greed for the right things can be greatly beneficial. Yes, Gordon Gekko, greed can be good. If a corporation becomes greedy for the success of the community and for the benefit of its customers, everybody wins. They can evolve to the level of the Giving Enterprise where the mindset switches polarity or at least moves to a neutral position of doing no net harm. Greed is a power to be harnassed and not to be harnassed by. To harness the right kinds of greed requires raising children with good life goals and ethics which takes time. If an individual sees their wealth not mainly as an avenue to greater opulence and self-satisfaction but as a means for helping others, being more charitable, then that wealth becomes meaningful and a successful, generous life will be celebrated.
This is based on an excerpt from my book: Wealth and the End of Money
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Creative type, founder of five companies: Hologramophone Research, Gluon, Techné Media, CaptureWorks and Nebulous. Author of Wealth and the End of Money