Tom Sowell takes on the accusation of "Greed"

hurled at economists and their followers among fiscal conservatives and libertarians. I heard A.L. Brown do it last night on AM1500. He said, approximately, that all that conservatives care about is money. My answer to the radio was, I wish conservatives would confine their policy prescriptions to reducing government and it's costs. A.L. was taught in college that the purpose of the government is to decide who gets the loot.

Just a minute ago, I was reading a guy who said, "for most Libertarians, the credo is, 'I've got mine. You go get yours.'"

Funny, I don't remember running across that line in any to the 10- or 20,000 or so pages of Libertarian literature I've read.

Anyway, Sowell:

Think about it: I could become so greedy that I wanted a fortune twice the size of Bill Gates’ — but this greed would not increase my income by one cent.

If you want to explain why some people have astronomical incomes, it cannot be simply because of their own desires — whether “greedy” or not — but because of what other people are willing to pay them.

The real question, then, is: Why do other people choose to pay corporate executives so much?

A partial answer:

Many observers who say that they cannot understand how anyone can be worth $100 million a year do not realize that it is not necessary that they understand it, since it is not their money.
...
One of the reasons why central planning sounds so good, but has failed so badly that even socialist and communist governments finally abandoned the idea by the end of the 20th century, is that nobody knows enough to second guess everybody else.

My beloved Walter Williams wrote an article a while back called The Virtue of Greed, and, of course there's John Stossel's special report on the topic.

About the Stossel show, David Kelley, President of The Objectivist Center, who was on the show, says this,

"But I will say there was one key point, which we spent a lot of time talking about, that really did not get into the program: the distinction between "good greed" and "bad greed." "Greed" is an ambiguous term. There is an important distinction to draw between the pursuit of money as a reward for achievement and as a financial instrument for further achievement, on the one hand; and the pursuit of money as an end in itself, or a means of acquiring power, or a means of acquiring prestige, or any of the other "global values" that I talked about in "The Best within Us" (The IOS Journal, March, May 1993). The pursuit of money in those latter contexts is greed in a bad sense. And that is a vice.

Of course, there are only a few people arguing, like Gordon Gekko, that "Greed is Good." (An inspiring speech, btw.) But people who lump both types of "greed" into one concept are not doing a service for humanity.