Steyn Rip Roars It Up On McCain
While he targets McCain I think what he says is applicable to many people that condemn greed.
I might as well chip in. I’m getting a bit tired of Senator McCain’s anti-business shtick. The line about serving “for patriotism, not for profit” is pathetic. America spends more on its military than the next 35-40 biggest military spenders on the planet combined: Where does he think the money for that comes from?
As for his line about “some greedy people on Wall Street who need to be punished”, aside from being almost entirely irrelevant to the subject under discussion (the subprime “crisis”), it reveals, I think, one of the most unpleasant aspects of McCain. For a so-called “maverick”, he’s very comfortable with the application of Big Government power, and the assumption of Big Government virtue. Undoubtedly there are “greedy people on Wall Street”. Why should he and his chums be the ones who decide whether they need to be “punished”? If greed is to be punishable, why doesn’t he start with a pilot program applied to, say, the United States Senate and report back to us in five years how that’s going?
The most important thing being said here is that even if greed is bad why should the state be in charge of regulating it. Those that want to control greed are no worse than those that want the state to control promiscuity.
January 31st, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Ladies and Gentelmen, your GOP candidate, John McCain!!!! Whoo Hoo!!!
You know it’s bad when even Rush can’t throw his fat butt in the ring to express how much he loves a fellow republican.
What happened to all of your boys steve? Thompson, Rudy, etc…..
January 31st, 2008 at 1:53 pm
The state needs to step in when greed comes above ethics, which hurts the public trust, and reduces people’s willingness to invest. I believe this is the thinking behind the SEC. However, McCain’s simplistic (or non-existent) knowledge of economics does not bode well for his leadership potential in defining the difference between unethical greed and just good business.
January 31st, 2008 at 5:05 pm
More to the point, greed tends to make people do things that the government DOES need to intervene in, such as commit fraud (such as the bankers in the blog post you pointed to yesterday).
January 31st, 2008 at 10:42 pm
I think confusion of “greed” and “ambition” is pretty endemic among the comfortable and the envious. Or in other words, the U.S. electorate.
February 1st, 2008 at 12:15 am
Would you not call ‘the ambition to make as much money as possible’ as ‘greed’? It sounds like the definition to me.
February 1st, 2008 at 11:34 am
Darwin, not quite, I would define ‘greed’ as the the desire to amass power (usually in the form of money), regardless of the consequences to others. Greedy people live in a zero-sum world and will attempt to take what others have, frequently bending and breaking the rules to do so.
Zero-sum, in most instances is a fallacy, and the ambitious don’t necessarily behave as if its true. So their behavior is tempered by the desire to go back to the well and get people to voluntarily part with their money again.
Besides, I’m primarily objecting to the practice of scoring cheap political points off an already untrusted minority, by demonizing and scapegoating them.