GREED!!!

Playwright Tony Kushner at a commencement speech to graduating college seniors had this to say:

"The people and not the oil plutocrats, the multivarious multicultural people and not the pale, pale, cranky, grim greedy people, the hard working people and not the people whose only real exertion ever in their parasite lives has been the effort it takes to get politicians to slash a trillion dollars in tax revenue and then stuff it in their already overfull pockets." 

Then there is Bill Moyers who stated:

"We must guard against true believers in the god of the market who would leave us to the ruthless forces of unfettered monopolistic capital where even the laws of the jungle break down....And these idolators wrap themselves in the flag and rely on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder.  While your standing at attention with your hand over your heart pledging allegiance to the flag, they're picking your pocket."

This attack on the free market system, while just a faint echo in the past, has been growing in volume in recent years.  But in spite of the protestations, free markets have resulted in mankind stepping out of abject poverty to a steady improvement in standards of living.  Before the Industrial Revolution which took hold around 1800, life was poor, brutish, and short for the masses.  It brought  about a new concept...economic growth, which  spawned a growing middle class, and ultimately many in the middle class becoming truly wealthy.  Alan Greenspan said, "It is precisely the 'greed' of the profit-seeker which is the unexcelled protection of the consumer."  Then John Maynard Keynes stated, "Avarice and usury must be our gods for a little longer still.  For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."

Author Ayn Rand had this insight:  "America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to 'the common good', but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.  They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization.  They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods."

Then there is Henry Hazlitt who writes, "Contrary to the age-old prejudices, the wealth of the rich is not the cause of the poverty of the poor.  Almost anything that the rich can legally do tends to help the poor.  The spending of the rich gives employment to the poor.  But the savings of the rich, and their investment of these savings in the means of production , gives just as much employment, and in addition, makes that employment constantly more productive and more highly paid."

All of the above documents the wide gulf between two opinions.  Which opinion represents the truth?  The important thing is to question everything rather than blindly accept what is being handed to you.  If we objectively seek truth, eventually it will come gently to us.