Posted by
Nerdus Maximus on Monday, July 31, 2006 9:14:42 PM
Doug Giles writes about
greed as one of the seven
deadly sins. He mentions that
hasn’t and won’t work, but doesn’t say why.
I have found it helpful to approach all economic systems as answers to
the problem of greed, which makes it clear why most of them don’t work.
Communism tries to contain
greed by involving everyone in the community in every decision. This doesn’t work well if the group is large
or the decisions are complex.
Socialism is an attempt to
keep the “everyone owns everything” element of Communism while entrusting
complex decisions to specialists. The
problem here is that greed has an easy path to corrupt the specialist.
Capitalism takes a different
approach. It makes one person’s greed
eventually have to help others to move towards its goal. The greed-driven individual can amass only
so much single-handedly because there are only 24 hours in a day. The path to advancement requires getting
others to willingly participate in your pursuit of gain. These may be employees or stockholders, but
their cooperation is essential to further gain. If you treat your stockholders or employees badly they will
abandon you, which is expensive.
Greed is a virulent evil,
but capitalism has more ability to develop antibodies than any other economic
system yet devised.
Nerdus
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