Posted by
Andrews on Wednesday, February 22, 2012 9:40:32 PM
While I was doing the prep work for my essay on wages and labor, I discovered another topic I think deserves to be revisited. While I covered it well in an earlier essay ("
Greed
Versus
Evil"), there is still a lot of material that has been discussed since that essay, as well as some matters I have not covered at all. And so, in addition to the two essays I mention in "
Next Big Essay", I also want to write a large, definitive essay explaining the ways in which greed, when left unfettered in a free market, restrained only by the requirement of respecting the rights of others, will end up producing optimal results, conferring the greatest benefits to others. I may also examine the opposite side of that argument, the way supposedly selfless measures enacted by government to supposedly improve the welfare of everyone end up reducing the total satisfaction of everyone involved. There may be some other ancillary topics to examine as well, such as how greed, even in a less than ideal market, tends to produce results better than enforced altruism, but we will see what specific topics are and are not covered when I write it. (Greed is a big topic. We have not only the free market aspects, as well as government's anti-greed agenda, but the differentiation between selfishness and envy, greed in a free market versus robbers and bandits -- cf "
Knights and Bandits" -- and on and on. So I have a hard time deciding in advance how broad or narrow a scope this essay will eventually encompass.)