Blogdaughter Tammi of Road Warrior Survival says greed is bad:

Not just greed for money or things. Greed overall. A person can be greedy for power, attention, success.....anything. Being overly concerned with having the most of ANYTHING is not good.

I avoid people like that to all degrees. For one main reason. You can't trust them.

Me, I'm not so sure. Let me check the dictionary:

An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth

Looks like it all depends on what you mean by "excessive" and "more than what one needs or deserves".

Tammi does the sensible thing and draws the line later in the post as follows:

They will step on anyone, use anything to make themselves look good.

Fair enough, I'd consider lying, cheating & stealing "excessive".

However, all too often I see people (usually the business-hating left as they pimp for higher tax rates) defining greed as "the successful acquisition of more than I have, regardless of the means used to acquire it".

I don't agree with that.

Greed is simply the desire to accumulate, which everyone has to some degree. What matters is HOW you go about doing the accumulation. If you're exchanging value for value and engaging in win-win transactions, then I don't think ANY of your aquisitory desire can properly be called "excessive". Some people look at Sam Walton (founder of Wal-Mart) as greedy. I see him as merely successful. He didn't cheat anyone. He was just better at the retail sales game than everyone else.

I suppose I'm just being nitpicky and overly concerned with a minor semantic point. However, the fact that "excessive" remains undefined allows unscroupulous people to smear the ambitious with charges of greed. That's why I'm uncomfortable with the term, and that's why I'd prefer that, when people use it, they draw a clear line on where "acceptable" crosses over to "excessive".

Unlike Tammi, I've never seen a Democrat/lefty/socialist make the effort to do that.

Posted by: Harvey at 08:36 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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