It is interesting, while those on the left often blame greed for the ills of modern society, often when they attempt to accuse businesses of harmful practices, they actually describe schemes that would end up losing money. In other words, while they blame greed, the truth is greed would result in quite beneficial acts, while the acts they describe are completely at odds with the profit motive.

I noticed this while I was writing last night about the myth of slave traders allowing slaves to starve on long voyages and throwing bodies overboard. As I wrote then, that simply makes no sense. A slave represents an investment, and greed would dictate that one would exercise at least a minimal consideration for the slave's well being to prevent a loss of that investment.The much vilified greed actually serves to help preserve the slaves. In fact, slavery itself is evidence of the humanizing effects of greed. Where previously prisoners in warfare would be killed, once they had value as slaves, mass slaughter became a thing of the past. True, slavery is hardly a good thing, but compared to extermination it is a step in the right direction.

But the left doesn't seem to get this, they fail to understand that more often than not, greed pushes in the direction of better behavior rather than worse. Instead they blame greed while describing behavior which is actually the antithesis of greed.

For example, the popular image of the "evil speculator" is just absurd. They propose speculators who simply keep buying oil in order to "make prices rise". The technical problems with this description are manifold, but I will ignore those for now, and concentrate only on how greed would cause different, better behavior. Even if a speculator could drive up prices through his buying alone, what would he then do? In the theory of the left, he keeps buying to keep prices high. In reality, driven by greed, he would cash out by selling, causing prices to go down once more. And, in fact, that is how the class of speculators work in the real world, with the entire class of speculators following trends, rather than starting them. When prices are lower than expected, they buy and rive up prices, but then as prices rise they sell, causing prices to drop. Speculators tend to level out price spikes and reduce the price shocks caused by unexpected shortages or surpluses. Greed makes ht emarket mor epredictable and prices more consistent. But in the liberal mind speculators just buy and buy and buy, driving up prices but never cashing out. That is not greed, that is insane.

Or let us look at the oil companies themselves. The left believes the oil companies have millions of productive acres under lease, yet won't drill on them because they want to keep prices high. Now, there are some situations where an artificial shortage can benefit the producer, but in most cases that requires a very small market with few competitors, and that does not describe the oil market well at all. In most cases, as has been the lesson of the entire twentieth century, making a small profit on a huge volume is the path to fortune. Look at Ford and Rolls Royce. Or Walmart and Christian Dior. You can see the mass distributor tends to be much richer. The sale of expensive items is self limiting, while mass sales allows for almost infinite expansion. So, if the oil companies were truly greedy, they would be drilling everywhere they could. Sitting on those leases to drive up prices is simply cartoonish evil, not greed. (Of course, the truth is the leases are not of the nature described at all, and the left is completely misunderstanding the situation. But that is a topic for another essay.)

Or let us look at the banks which loaned money to poor credit risks. If we listen to the caricature painted by the left, they are enacting every silent movie villain stereotype short of tying someone's daughter to railroad tracks. The left thinks that somehow giving loans on inflated property values, then foreclosing on a house which has lost a quarter of its value is going to make these companies rich. To which I would reply, if that is so, why didn't falling housing prices make the owners rich? The truth is, the lenders were harmed as much as or more than the borrowers. Thanks to a combination of artificially low interest rates and bad government policies regarding lending, they gave a number of very risky loans to borrowers who should not have received them, and they now find themselves with non-performing loans and a lot of overvalued properties. That is a recipe for bankruptcy, not riches. Yet the left paints the granting of risky loans and the subsequent foreclosures as the result of bankers' greed. Somehow they think that collecting a lot of worthless properties and bankrupting a number of poor black families is all it takes to make banks rich.

For those who doubt this strange confusion about greed, I refer you to an old post of mine, talking about a comment critical of Phil Gramm. It reads in part:

At the same time Gramm, one of John McCain's top economic advisors, was helping McCain write his economic program and response to the housing industry mess, Gramm was also vice president and a paid lobbyist for UBS. He was once again advocating further deregulation of the financial industry for a company that has taken a huge hit in subprime American mortgages.

Think about the logic there. UBS lost money thanks to the subprime crisis, so they would push for more deregulation? Does that even make sense. The argument seems to be that they would intentionally ask to lose more money because they are greedy. Can anyone make sense out of that?

The problem, of course, is that the left has repeated their watered down Marxist line for so long that "greed' has become a synonym for "evil" in their minds. So when they paint their Snidely Whiplash-like villains twirling their mustaches and committing their evil deeds it is simply reflex to blame their acts on "greed". Or perhaps they really do so poorly understand economics, and even simple business, that they think that greed drives one to do stupid things like produce nothing to get rich, or foreclose on overpriced homes to make money.

I do not have the time or space to explain how greed, rightly understood, is a beneficial influence, and how trade has led to more peace than all the conferences and committees and other feel good groups on earth. Then again, why bother. What the left claims is the result fo greed is clearly not, so I don't think they really oppose greed at all. If they think losing money and acting against one's own financial interest is greed, then maybe they are opposing something completely different and using the wrong name for it.

Maybe they don't oppose greed at all. Maybe they simply have their definitions wrong.