Guest post: Fuck you, Wall Street.
Fuck you, Gordon Gekko: Greed is not good.
In the original Wall Street, the character Gordon Gekko's most memorable moment is when he launches into his monologue about how "greed is good." In the years since, the "greed is good" slogan has been trotted out again and again to tell us why capitalism is good and socialism/communism is bad. The cult of greed that was sown by Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in the 50s and 60s was reaped by Gordon Gekko in the 80s, and infused into every facet of American life since then.
Gekko's quote:
"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will [save] that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A."
Gordon Gekko's "greed is good" speech serves as the standard bearer for 80s excesses, "Reaganomics," and the trickle-down theory. Greed is credited for improving our lives through innovation and the competition which drives it. Greed is supposedly what moves us forward. Greed is the driver behind capitalism, and capitalism is what runs this country, not government. According to the Tea-Bagger set, government is utterly incapable of doing anything and should simply defer to private capitalistic enterprises. If we give ourselves over to capitalism and free market policies, we can solve our financial crisis. Bullshit.
Greed is not good. Greed isn't right. Greed doesn't work. It deceives and retards our progress as a society. Greed gave us Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, and Bernie Madoff. Greed gave us the S&L disaster. Greed gave us the tech-bubble of the late 90s. Greed gives us overseas outsourcing and offshore incorporation. Greed widens the chasm between the ends of the economic spectrum, and does so at the cost of jobs, wages, and the overall standard of living. Greed is what is wrecking America.
Greed is not good. It's a bullshit line that sociopathic money mongers spout to justify their conscienceless pursuit of more money, more property, more privilege, more, more, more. And if we lived in a society that was run like Lord of the Flies it might make sense. Instead, we live in a complete society, not Ayn Rand's paper-thin, two-dimensional society of moral and economic absolutism where people who can't fit into one of the two polar opposites, are simply discarded or disregarded.
Greed is selfishness. Greed doesn't give a flying fuck about what happens to this country so long as the capitalists and corporatists can turn a profit. No private company has done anything for society where the underlying motive was not for the profit of the company first. Greed did not put a man on the moon. Greed did not give us the Internet. Capitalism and greed, in their purest forms, are sociopathic. They are a psychological disease of self-centrism and egotism. "More and more for me, me, me" and fuck the consequences.
Without a doubt, within a capitalist system, we have to have competition. If you are better at a job than me, then you should get the job. If you make a better product than someone else, you should be successful. I have no argument with that. The best person wins. But we can't have a society that only rewards "winners" and leaves the losers on the side of the road to rot and die. We are better than that—we as human beings and fellow Americans cannot accept that kind of dehumanization and make irrelevant those who are not good enough to "win" at the game of capitalism.
Greed doesn't work. Greed got Glass-Steagall repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) and permitted banks to engage in banking, insuring, and investing activities. By repealing Glass-Steagall and permitting banks to engage in banking, insuring, and investing, the market collapse of 2008/2009 was inevitable. The entire rationale of GLBA's repeal of Glass-Steagall was that banks wouldn't engage in the kind of risky investing that led to the market crash in 1929. They'd learned their lessons and, besides, they were the masters of the universe and too smart to make that kind of mistake. But greed drove banks to engage in riskier and riskier lending practices. Greed drove investment houses to engage in unregulated and impenetrably complex investment vehicles based on the results of those riskier and riskier lending practices. Greed drove insurers of the risky lending practices to back their policies with investments—investments based on the increasingly risky lending practices. Like NASA and the "Challenger" disaster, they took on increasing amounts of risk because they kept "getting away with it."
And when the house of cards started to collapse, greed made the banks (those that survived) come to the governments looking for a bailout. It was necessary to save our own pocketbooks and we did it. For once, our collective greed did something good for us.
Tags: capitalism, economy, evil, government, greed, insanity
Greed forced me out of a job while I was comatose after a car accident. Get this, I was working when I was in the accident, but the employer refuses to pay workman's compensation.
19th October 2010 at 2:01 pm | permalink |Damn. As in, you can't even file a claim against him, because he doesn't pay into it? Or as in, he refuses to pay out on your claim? Either way, I would think you can get him legally… but good luck on that, and on getting back on your feet.
19th October 2010 at 2:46 pm | permalink |[...] Guest post: Fuck you, Wall Street. Greed is selfishness. Greed doesn't give a flying fuck about what happens to this country so long as the capitalists and corporatists can turn a profit. No private company has done anything for society where the underlying motive was not for the profit of the company first. Greed did not put a man on the moon. Greed did not give us the Internet. Capitalism and greed, in their purest forms, are sociopathic. They are a psychological disease of self-centrism and egotism. "More and more for me, me, me" and fuck the consequences. [...]
20th October 2010 at 4:35 am | trackback from Rot In Hell, Ayn Rand « Mike Cane's xBlog"…Greed gave us Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, and Bernie Madoff." No, these lousy excuses for human beings screwed people on their own — and they would have done it no matter the socio-economic model of the country where they lived.
Look at what happened in the former USSR after it collapsed — these same type of people became billionaires on the backs of the workers — even in this supposedly perfect socialist paradise.
Look at how many billionaires there are in the former USSR, and note the similarities between them and the Milken/Boesky/Madoff triumvirate you mentioned.
• • •
@Rob Carson — Generally speaking, Workers Comp is the remedy for injuries sustained in the course of employment. Your employer canNOT refuse to pay it. You file the claim and collect your due. If, as I once discovered, your employer refused to pay the premiums — the judge handling your case will deal with him. GO AHEAD AND FILE THE CLAIM.
20th October 2010 at 2:30 pm | permalink |@anthony: From what I hear, a lot of Russian psychopath billionaires are even more blatant about flouting the law than our home-grown psychos.
And really, I think that's about the only explanation for their behavior. You can't completely disregard the negative consequences of your actions unless you lack a functioning conscience.
20th October 2010 at 4:35 pm | permalink |@ anthony: You completely miss the point, and at the same time illustrate it exactly.
Greed is what drove them to their misdeeds. Greed is what drives criminals to hold up liquor stores or rob banks. Greed drives our baser instincts.
On the other hand, as alphabitch mentioned, it is our conscience, our obligation to, and respect for the social order. Check your history on the USSR and the collapse of communism … or check back further to the fall of the Czars and the Russian Revolution, then through the ebb and tide of Lenin and Stalin, through the purges of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and on through the Cold War. You'll find plenty of greed and lack of conscience there, as well.
I believe you are being sarcastic when you refer to the former USSR as a "supposedly perfect socialist paradise." I guess you're trying to get a dig in about the evils of communism? Yeah, the USSR sucked as a state. But before we go down the road of discussing the differences between communism, socialism, and capitalism, I'd like to know: Do you even understand the difference between the three? If you don't, I'd suggest doing a little reading/education on the topics before spouting further platitudes and talking points.
22nd October 2010 at 3:17 am | permalink |@Beccca Indeed, one wonders why a hack on greed would get interpreted as a giant hack on Western Capitalism™, and apparently God, Mom and Apple Pie too. *shrug* "But MOOOOOOM, they did it TOOOOOO!" really doesn't impress me as an advanced debating tactic.
22nd October 2010 at 4:08 pm | permalink |The more I think about it, the gap between Hobbes and Locke seems to me to be a critical and salient consideration here.
I've always felt that Hobbes' view of the world was overly-cynical and harsh. Locke seemed to be the "just right" balance between the basic driving force behind human nature and our need for self-preservation within a social order. But I wonder if a bifurcated approach is better, with Hobbes' authoritarian approach used to govern the marketplace (property and economic pursuits), while Locke's approach is what's necessary to govern life outside of economics (personal liberty).
Quite possibly, one of the most significant points that Americans need to understand is the difference between individuals and companies. Individuals are physically incarnate beings with all the rights attendant to an individual in a society. Companies, on the other hand, are merely (and literally) a legal fiction devoid of any physically incarnate presence and therefore, not endowed with the same rights as individuals–in short, companies do not have civil rights, like freedom of speech or the right to bear arms.
24th October 2010 at 4:29 am | permalink |"Greed did not put a man on the moon. Greed did not give us the Internet."
What a load of bullshit. Everything that has ever been done, has been done for one of two reasons: Someone was greedy enough to do it for themselves; or someone forced someone else to do it.
25th October 2010 at 7:24 am | permalink |William—be honest now—you masturbate to Galt's ridiculous monologue in Atlas Shrugged, don't you?
25th October 2010 at 1:46 pm | permalink |@ William: Who/what put the man on the moon? Our collective desire to move ahead of the Russians in the space race, maybe? They set the bar by putting Sputnik up. We set it higher by putting a man on the moon. That wasn't the achievement of private enterprise, it was the achievement of a bunch of really smart guys working with government funding to figure out how to make it happen.
Einstein didn't come up with the theory of relativity because of greed, he came up with it while trying to solve a problem. No one "forced" him to unravel the basic equation of space/time relativity.
We didn't unravel the mystery of the atom through private enterprise. It was done with government funding and a bunch of smart guys with a problem to solve. No one "forced" them to figure out how to split the atom.
We didn't come up with the Internet through private enterprise. It was done as a government project–another problem to solve with the solution funded by government money and a bunch of smart people.
If you want to equate greed and problem solving, go right ahead, but they come from different human motivations. Greed as a driving force, unchecked by a conscience, is sociopathic selfishness that feeds off of others.
26th October 2010 at 5:14 am | permalink |@alphabitch
Yes. Yes I do. All joking aside, I have never read it. I see sections refrenced here and there, but I have never sat down and read the whole thing. So shoot me. I happen to believe that intelligence is not defined simply by what you have read. That makes you a good reader, not a good thinker.
@Becca
Maybe we are defining greed differently. I was simply using the quote that this article was created around.
The moon landing was a demonstration. America wanted to prove to the Russians that, not only could we launch a ballistic missile, we could hit a moving target over 600,000 miles away. As a nation, we were greedy to have this technology first. We were greedy to have that upper hand in the cold war, and thank God we did.
You have no fucking clue what Einstein's motives were. Einstein was a jew who escaped the Germans by moving to Switzerland. It is perfectly sensible that he did his work as a slap in the face to the established German science. A personal greed to prove that Jews are not the "inferior" race that the German's claimed. Not to mention that he sided with the allies to destroy the Germans that persecuted him.
We have not uncovered the full mysteries of the atom. Independant scientists are still researching what happens at the sub-atomic level. This is also fueled by greed as defined by Gordon Geko. It is greed of what can be gained by knowing the technology. Whether it be alternative fuel or a different shade of red to sell to Crayola.
The Internet could possibly be the worst example that you cited. It was originally called the DARPA-NET, created by the Department of Defense out of greed for information. "We need it NOW!"
Gordon Geko's definition of greed covers a broad stroke of human motives. Pride, shame, nationalism, just to name a few. Based on that, GREED IS GOOD. It drives us to excell in school and in our careers. We want, no WE NEED to be the very best at whatever the fuck we do best, to be the one who gets those government contracts, to be the one who gets the promotion.
Becca, is your last name Pelosi, by chance? All I hear from you is collective this and government that. Get your face out of alphabitch's crotch (not saying that there's anything wrong with alphabitch's crotch, mind you) and put it in a history book.
26th October 2010 at 2:00 pm | permalink |"…I have never sat down and read the whole thing. So shoot me. I happen to believe that intelligence is not defined simply by what you have read. That makes you a good reader, not a good thinker."
Touchy, touchy. I never suggested being well read is the sole determinant of intelligence. The more you read, the more puzzle pieces your brain has to work with, but it doesn't determine how good you are at manipulating the pieces, no.
Frankly, I wish I could get back the time I wasted reading Atlas years ago. hehe
And, as for your and Becca's apparently misunderstanding, I believe what she's getting at is that curiosity and/or ambition != greed. You can be curious and ambitious without being materialistic, but greed is a purely materialistic urge. You can want to solve a problem for the simple sake of knowing the answer. You can want to run faster for the simple joy/sense of accomplishment of running faster (although I think that's very strange). But you can't be greedy without wanting material gain, because that's what greed is.
You are conveniently stretching the definition just like Gecko did. Which was kinda Becca's whole point to begin with.
26th October 2010 at 4:13 pm | permalink |alphabitch,
I actually agree with everything you just said.
It's amazing that we can take one word and derive two seperate meanings.
I, personally think that if you want, rather than need something, it's greed.
It's often funny how us Bible-thumping conservatives can be greedy as well, but what the Hell, my Bible says that I am born of sin, so I'm going to run with that excuse.
Later Cunts!
P.S. Even though you ladies make it cool to say, I'm still not comfortable saying "cunt," so forgive me if I don't use it often.
26th October 2010 at 5:26 pm | permalink |@ alphabitch: Nailed my point exactly. Thank you.
@ William: For the record, the original goal behind DARPA's work was to design a fault tolerant network that could exchange data across distributed network paths and route around outages in the event of a node going down (e.g., a nuclear strike). Problem solved.
26th October 2010 at 6:27 pm | permalink |Mecca,
For the record, Suck a fucking razor cock.
It was still a greed for that data. So in the words of Les Grossman, "Go fuck yaselffffffffffff."
26th October 2010 at 6:52 pm | permalink |Greed implies excess, and I don't think simply wanting something you don't need is excessive. If I want a cup of tea, it's certainly not going to kill me to not have it, but I have a hard time thinking of that as greedy.
When you want something so bad you don't even think about the consequences? That's greed. And that's the problem with Wall Street.
26th October 2010 at 10:09 pm | permalink |Since William seems to have left, I feel I should say something on his behalf, continue the fight as it were.
Therefore, I say:
HURRRRRRR
And provide a link as reference: http://bit.ly/cK5wxL
30th October 2010 at 1:11 am | permalink |I now feel obligated to add a "DURRRRRR" and also a "DERP DERP DERP" for good measure.
30th October 2010 at 1:50 am | permalink |Leaving the more ad hominem stuff aside, I'm definitely more on William and Gordons' side in this. Greed is good. Or least, it's good, until it isn't. The defining difference between humans and the animals is not that we don't suffer the same greedy impulse, but that we can choose to moderate it.
If you overfeed a goldfish, it just keeps eating until it dies. If a human produces a surplus of food, they will, hopefully, use part of that surplus to help others. Of course, that's partially in expectation that if they themselves fall on hard times, that others will then help them from *their* surplus, maybe the very same people they once helped.
As with anything to do with humans though, you get a spectrum of responses, with GG at one end, believing in the acquisition of money for its' own sake, and at the other crazy cat ladies who would sacrifice their own basic needs for the benefit of others, even if they are just cats. The "right" answer clearly lies somewhere in between (and is variable, depending on external circumstances), but we still need, really, really need, individuals who represent both ends of the spectrum. If nothing else, they serve as object lessons.
As a system, it's self-correcting. Societies that gave too much weight to the "greed" end of the spectrum (Classical Athens, Imperial Rome, Imperial England) get it wrong and die because they try to hoard too much for themselves, and force others to take it from them. Societies that go the other way (Communist states, for instance) fail because they don't provide any reason for anyone to do anything of much, and they collapse under the weight of their own attempted equality.
Long, long ago in another life, I knew a guy who was a senior exec at Marconi. They were one of the first companies into Russia after the fall of the USSR, and he did a lot of work setting up the JVs, and generally helping to transition them to a capitalist, market-based economy. He always said the hardest part of the job was getting anyone to understand that things needed doing. Like, at all. The problem stemmed from the Communist ideal of collective responsibility. Since everyone was responsible, noone was, and that was carrying over into their new "capitalist" lives.
To draw a parallel with physics, you can kind of regard societies as closed systems, and look at them from a thermodynamic point of view. In a "greedy" society, a few members control a vast share of the resources, the equivalent of very hot particles, hoarding all the energy. Such a system is incredibly unstable, and will inevitably explode. In an "egalitarian" society, the energy is shared absolutely evenly. However, in the physical system, that means that there is no energy available for work, due to degeneracy, and the system is effectively dead, and you can see a similar effect in Communism. Whilst the analogy only goes so far, it's not a bad one, really
OK, having reread that, I'm coming across a mite, um, philosophical, not to say pompous. Don't get me wrong, I'm not with Ayn Rand on this either. Both as individuals and as societies, we should seek to be greedy, to grab what we can. The measure of our success as human beings lies in what we do with what we have taken. If we can learn compassion to temper it, greed works just fine. If.
My God, I really need to get the stick out of my ass
3rd November 2010 at 3:13 am | permalink |The "self-correcting system" line is a lovely and entirely true idea in the big picture. Kindly come over here and explain how that all works so nicely to people who lost their homes in the mortgage fiasco. Or to people who lost their jobs because their greedy corporate bosses realized they could pad their own paychecks better by moving their factories to countries with no wage or worker safety regulations. Or, y'know, all those lovely folks in Iceland who watched their entire banking system collapse virtually overnight? I'm sure it'll make them all feel much better, no?
If you want to talk sterile theory to the exclusion of the very real human beings upon whose backs those theories are written? I can play that game too. In fact I'll be touching on it in my next post. But yes, it does make you sound like a pompous, heartless ass.
And unfortunately, it seems greed is more widespread and more powerful than the compassion that would allow it to be naturally regulated so as NOT to steamroll merrily over the people at the bottom, while the greedy fucks at the top try to figure out how to install a turbo unit on the fucking steamroller. And that is why unfettered greed is not good. Which is really the moral of the story here. Greed is unavoidable. But if greedy people aren't kept in some measure of reasonable check, via intelligently designed regulation, greed destroys many, many more lives than those it enriches.
3rd November 2010 at 3:23 pm | permalink |I've read the arguments here and they map arguments I've had many times before – you are taking the 'greed is good' statement and then liberally interpreting it to promote the argument you want to support.
Try and look at the opposite scenario where no one wanted anything for themselves?
Do you think that the human race would have made it this far without that premise.
I propose that wanting the best looking 'girlfriend/boyfriend' or possibly the most 'girlfriends/boyfriends' is in itself greed – and that is biologicaly programmed from an earlier time. In that the 'best looking' is 'the most healthy' and thus likely to produce the best offspring.
Thus the entire raison d'etre of the human race is greed.
The fact is that greed is present in all of us – you wouldn't survive without it! – the differentiating factor is that for some their greed overtakes their abililty to work with others causing problems for the overall good of society, whereas most people have enough control of their greed that they work for the good of their society, because they know that by working together they will invariably gain more than those who work solely for themselves.
–Hmm not entirely happy with how I've worded this but I'll post it anyway and hope you get my meaning.
26th November 2010 at 4:44 pm | permalink |I have to accept that greed serves a positive purpose for individuals. But we have collectively chosen civilization as the course for humanity.
That course demands that greed be limited thru regulations determined by society. In America we had done a fair job of that after the economic crisis of the '30s, we had a fairly stable economy. Unfortunately, for various reasons, we dismantled the regulations.
The problem now seems to be that we are too arrogant to admit that we might have actually been wrong!
2nd December 2010 at 5:13 pm | permalink |Well, I suppose now we're just down to a semantic argument about the exact definition of greed. If you count it as "aspiring to anything more than you currently possess/have achieved", then yes, whether or not it's bad or good is a matter of degrees. However, I've always taken the word to have a more nuanced meaning than that… having a second slice of your birthday cake is one thing, trying to shovel half of it into your mouth before anyone else can get to it is greedy.
By my definition, greed is NOT good. Although, it could fairly be said that by my meaning what constitutes greed is also a matter of degree… whenever your definition of greed turns from bad to good is where my definition of greed begins.
16th December 2010 at 1:35 am | permalink |