Fire and Greed
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It has been a bad year for forest fire fighters, and a bad year for investors. Fires have broken out in near record numbers, and Colorado had the largest fire in its history. The Dow Jones has been racked by scandal after corporate scandal, and has lost almost 7% of its value since the beginning of the year. The two situations are of course unrelated, but they are connected. The root causes of each are very dangerous substances.
People like to say that fire is neutral, that it ’s effect depends upon how you use it. That is not entirely true. Once a fire has started, it has animation, it will seek out and consume fuel for as long as it is able. Fire, in its native state, is bad. We tend to think of fire - when we think of it at all - favorably. That is only because we have chained fire, bent it to serve our good. Notice, however, that we are careful to chain it, to never allow it access to fuel on its own, to wall it off. Every city has a cadre of brave men and women whose job it is to contain fire when it gets out of control.
Greed is very much like fire. People say it is good. It is not. In its native form, it is as rapacious as fire. Instead of twigs and tinder, it devours ethics, pensions, investors, savings, and even, eventually, if left unchecked, economies. Greed can be made to work for our good, but only when we beat it and chain it. Only when it channeled and constrained, only when it is walled off from its fuel, can we direct it towards useful goals. Unfortunately, we seem to have forgotten that. In the name of “efficiency” and “competition” and “deregulation” we have unchained our greed, let it loose among the dry fuel of our savings and 401k plans. Worse, we have under-funded and denigrated the people we rely on to protect us from our out of control greed. Unbelievably, some still insist that there is no danger, that greed can only do goods, that we should step back and allow it to burn through what it would. We should no more do that than allow the fires in Colorado to burn Denver. This is not a needed clearing of the underbrush, this is an inferno attacking the very underpinnings- transparency, trust, fairness - of our economic system. It is far past time that we correct our mistakes, and get our greed under our control again.
I think that the whole “greed is good” argument is a bunch of BS. It’s never greed that is good, rather the motivation to do well… there’s a big difference. Greed is the desire to acquire more than one needs or deserves - that’s not something that bodes well for workers or the economy, not on the small scale or the large scale. The reason the “greed is good” argument was invented was so that the people at the “top” would have to stop explaining why, exactly, it was reasonable for such a small percentage of the population to control so much of the wealth.
Comment 8/1/2002