Class War in America: the Book |
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to download this material for personal, not-for-profit, use. If you duplicate it for others, attribute it to Charles M. Kelly, and with a link to this site. Print copies are still available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and used copies are widely available on the internet. Part Three The
War Against Traditional
Values Greed
is always in the news. The
activists and advocates of this world are guaranteed to hit the greed
button any time certain subjects come up: chief executive officer
compensation, for example. Or threats to the rain forest. Or lowering the
tax rate on capital gains.… It
is worth recalling that greed (a.k.a. avarice) is at bottom a religious
concept. It is one of the seven deadly sins, a package that seems to have
originated in Christian monasticism in the Middle East, and was brought to
the Western world around A.D. 400, apparently by Roman monks. In the
medieval Church all seven sins were deemed especially wicked and all
required special penitence. Nobody is demanding penitence
today.… Face
it: Self-interest is a universal human trait, a near-defining
characteristic of Homo sapiens.… But if everybody is greedy (defined as
“self-interested”) then how can greed be the explanatory variable that
accounts for business success? …“greed.” Let’s deep-six the damned
word. —Dan
Seligman, “Out, out, damned word!”
Forbes, March 9, 1998,
88-92. Now go to:
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