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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (9013)	12/15/2010 3:50:33 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 10087

If you define greed as "the negative side of desire for profit", than you claim "greed is bad", you are presenting nothing new. Unless your saying all desire for profit is bad, your just saying "bad is bad". People who say "greed is good", almost never define greed as "the negative side of desire for profit". They are generally saying the drive for profit has results that overall are good. I very much doubt Sowell was supporting fraud, rent-seeking, theft, extortion etc. in the statement I quoted. Nothing in anything else I've ever read or heard from him would support thinking that was what he meant, and his actual statement was about "finding more efficient ways to produce a product or service at a lower cost, so that it could be sold at a lower price and attract more customers." If you want to say "finding more efficient ways to produce a product or service at a lower cost isn't greed", than fine I won't argue with you on that one (it is greed by one definition, but that perhaps is not the most common one). But then your letting the semantics get in the way of the point. Getting wealthy is more often as a result of a benefit created for others than it is at the net expense of others.