Monday Feb 22 2010
Greed is Legal is the tag line from Oliver Stone's Wall St II, coming this spring. I have added several links to this blog among them Jesse's Cafe, here are his thoughts this morning. Plato's Republic envisioned a totally different system more along the lines of what Jesse suggests here.
One has to wonder what would have happened if some more coherent, approachable science, had put forward a system of management that relied upon the nearly perfect rationality and unnatural goodness of men as a critical assumption in order to work? They would have been laughed out of the academy. Yes, there is a certain power to befuddle and intimidate common sense through the use of professionally specific jargon, supported by pseudo-scientific equations.
Why doesn't 'greed is good' work? Because rather than work harder, a certain portion of the population, not necessarily the most productive and intelligent, will immediately seek rents and extraordinary income obtained by unnatural advantages, by gaming the system, by cheating and coercion, by the subversion of the rule of law, which will sap the vitality of the greater portion of the population which does in fact work harder, until they can no longer sustain themselves. And then the greedy seek to expand their venality, and colonies and then empires are born.
What will take the place of these modern economic myths? Time will tell, and it will vary from nation to nation. But the winds of change are rising, and may soon be blowing a hurricane.
Professor Elam 
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