My theory / wild-assed guess on the origins of greed

[Nuclear Unicorn]

Near as I can tell, greed is an evolutionary response to resource scarcity. Like any psychological mechanism it can obviously take self-destructive trajectories.

Primitive man learned he could store what he harvested and hunted for those times when life was lean with famine or pestilence. Where once there was hunger he now had security and as his technology improved security could be expanded to become comfort. Let's face it, it's good to feed comfortably during what might otherwise be a time of starvation.

But building granaries wasn't enough. The starving tribe on the other side of the hill knew those granaries were there and they wanted the grain for their own use. So the granaries had to have walls erected around them. Survival gained the element of comeptition. After all, the "free market" is simply "tribalism" of a different scale. Corporate logos might as well be woad painted on a warrior's face before battle over this year's crops.

Worse still, humans have a resource abstraction called "money" and when it can be abstracted even further to electrons stored in a bank's database somewhere the destructive trajectory kicks in overtime. Electrons are easier to collect and store than vaults of gold bars, yet they do not provide the sense of ownership one has from holding a physical thing in one's own hand so the reflex is never satiated. A man may thirst but there will come a time when he stops drinking. Not so the greedy for whom too much is too little.

The need for security, the indulgence of comfort mixed with the reflexes instilled by competition and the absence of satisifaction become the perfect storm for the phenomenon known as greed. Perhaps it is overly ironic that a self-described christianist society is the most susceptible to a malformed evolutionary response.

Unless we can evolve new responses or God suddenly becomes real to cure our sick souls we are doomed to be doomed.



It sounds crazy, I know. Please don't flame me too hard.

[leftstreet]

1. Blaming greed for capitalism's failure is like blaming gravity for a bridge collapse

You design your system around it

[Nuclear Unicorn]

3. I did note that competition for food has translated

to competition of the free market in my OP when I mentioned logos were the modern equivalent of a warrior's face paint.

Capitalism is indeed based on competition and that competition becomes greed as evidenced by the fact that the CEOs of all big corporations, without exception, make more money than they would ever need to be secure, healthy or even comfortable. And yet, they seem to crave more and more and more.

I don't think we're as far apart as you may think.

[sam11111]

33. "based on" a desire to end all competition. One billionaire will be the end result.

Who will only need 300 million poor folks to produce the luxuries he loves.

"Population reduction" will then get rid of the rest of humanity.

[dkf]

2. Where does the little red hen fit into your theory?

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/stories/fairytale/littleredhen/story/

[Starry Messenger]

4. "Greed" is the name of the behavior rewarded by capitalism.

Take away the system and eventually the need to be "greedy" disappears from human behavior. Our first 10s of thousands of years were communal cooperative society. The "free market" and "tribalism" have nothing to do with each other. The rise of private property (slavery) gave rise to alienating humans from the earth, not "greed".

[Nuclear Unicorn]

8. Wouldn't it be fair to say greed lead to the forming of the concepts

of private property?

After all, if you're NOT greedy then sharing is no problem for you. It's only after you become greedy that you feel the need to say to someone, "No. No. You can't have that. It's mine."

[Starry Messenger]

11. I don't know about "fair".

I'm talking about the historical record. The rise of property had a certain historical lineage. The idea that emotions/ideas somehow "caused" human actions usually leads into "God" territory. A pattern of actions developed over several epochs. When profits entered the scene a few centuries ago, the behavior that we call greed began to be rewarded by the anti-social actions of taking from others. The need for an ever-expanding bottom line means that the concept of "enough" is illogical to the system. When that structure is taken away, it will no longer be "useful" to human society. The behavior will largely disappear because it is no longer rewarded.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

13. Maybe I'm crazy but I don't really think there's much daylight between our points

[Starry Messenger]

17. My main break is with the thought that this is a universal human trait.

Do you or I or John Q. DUer wake up every day and think "Who's shit can I steal?" Probably not. Only one sector of society gets rewarded (handsomely) for that behavior. It's a question of cause and effect. Does "greed" cause accumulation or does accumulation cause "greed"? If it is the former, then we are doomed because there is nothing to be done about it, it would be impossible to fix. If the latter, then we can do something about it, we can change society.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

14. I don't think that's true.

Capitalism as we know it is a pretty recent development, but greed has been rearing its ugly head since forever. It was condemned as a sin in the Bible in both the Old and the New Testaments and in the other writings of Judaism and Islam, and was considered one of the seven deadly sins that were first listed as such during the very early years of the Christian church. The Second Noble Truth in Buddhism says that desire (an aspect of greed) is the cause of suffering. The even more ancient Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita, says that there are three gates to self-destructive hell: greed, anger, and desire. Greed was obviously rampant during the pre-capitalist Middle Ages, when a small number of noblemen and church authorities controlled almost all the wealth and made sure to keep it away from the masses of destitute peasants.

While capitalism essentially treats greed as a virtue, it isn't the reason greed exists - capitalism merely facilitates it and provides modern governments with a justification for it. But I think the OP is basically right: greed is part of the human condition and has always been around. While eliminating capitalism in favor of some other -ism might take away the official imprimatur for greed, it will not make it go away.

[Starry Messenger]

19. Well, I don't consider religious books history books.

The first "poor laws" came with the rise of property, to punish those who had no land. Did the "greed" of the poor cause this? I'm talking about labeling this as an inborn human trait--it isn't.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

24. Religious books may not be history books, but they reflect human behavior

at the time they were written. If there were no such thing as greed during the 5th century BCE, why is it condemned as a sin in the Bhagavad-Gita? There have always been small pre-industrial societies that have managed to function cooperatively and avoid the excesses of capitalism (and feudalism, which predates capitalism by many centuries). But whenever a society becomes large enough to stratify, some group ends up with most of the stuff and everybody else is out of luck. This result is not unique to capitalism. You can go back through history as far as you want and you'll find greed. Let's go back even farther than the Bhagavad Gita and look at the Epic of Gilgamesh (not a religious book, but the relating of an ancient legend), which is about 4,600 years old. The protagonist, Gilgamesh, is ultimately destroyed by his own greed and pride. Greed is also a central theme of the oldest work of Western literature, The Iliad, ca. 800 BCE.

Greed has been around forever. As soon as people started accumulating property of any kind, they started getting greedy. Capitalism didn't cause greed. Greed caused capitalism.

[Starry Messenger]

25. Is it my memory going or were there also talking monkeys in the Bhagavad-Gita?

These are all works of fiction VO. Any "greed" they cited were probably aimed at the ruling classes. Which class rose from specific historical events, not from "greed". Greed has not "been around forever", although as you say, the more "advanced" cultures that get large do get founded by and for private property, so that behavior does become rewarded in pre-capitalist society, but nowhere at all on the scale that it does now.

The tribes found here in the States had really very little concept of private ownership before Europeans showed up to "teach" it to them, by taking their land. A concept like greed would have been really quite alien until the forced scarcity from outsiders taking their resources. It's a learned behavior.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

27. Works of fiction reflect human behavior.

If there were no such thing as greed nobody would have written about it, even in works of fiction. It is true that Native American tribes generally treated property as mainly communal, but that isn't because they had no concept of greed - it's because greed was condemned as evil and/or regarded as mental illness. For example: "To the Cree, and most Native North Americans, greed was a serious psychological malfunction. The Cree called it Wétiko. Native American philosopher Jack Forbes explains that the overriding characteristic of a wétiko, a Cree word literally meaning “cannibal,” is “that he consumes other human beings for profit, that is, he is a cannibal.” http://www.skeptic.ca/Wetiko.htm In other words, greed was a known behavior, but a bad one.

[Starry Messenger]

29. That link states that the Natives had no concept of private property:

This conception of a nation state was antithetical to the Native North American anarchistic world view. Castenada, a Franciscan priest who accompanied Coronado’s expedition, described the Hopis of New Mexico as living in “complete equality, neither exercising authority nor demanding obedience.” Castenada’s remark was a not uncommon observation by white Christian invaders of socialistic libertarian Native North American societies. Native peoples in North America believed that humans are merely a constituent of the natural world, not a chosen species instructed to master and exploit it with impunity. They had no conception of private property, believing that the world and its bounty was granted to all by their “Creator” and that no group or individual had the right to own any part of it. To the North American Indians, land had a very different meaning – culturally, economically and spiritually. “Sell a country!” Tecumseh shouted at a meeting of the representatives of the Northwest Territory in 1810. “Why not sell the air, the clouds, the rivers and the great sea as well as the entire earth?”

which better states what I was trying to say. The article doesn't state when the Cree developed the definition of Wetiko. I'd be interested to know if it was before or after the Colombian landfall. The only articles on the word I can find specifically refer to the reaction of the natives to the invaders and their rapaciousness, not anything previous to that.

[LooseWilly]

30. If there were no such thing as Divine avatars of gods, would they be written about?

Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita, is an avatar of Vishnu, who comes to earth, among other reasons, to teach Arjuna how to kill and be a good soldier— the fine points of Kshatriya Yoga.

So, according to your thinking: "If there were no such thing as greed nobody would have written about it, even in works of fiction."... by extension then there are little god-projection people who wander the earth ("If there were no such thing as divine avatars nobody would have written about it, even in works of fiction.") teaching people (especially royalty and religious-types) how to excel at "staying in their place" (the kernel of the idea of the yogas of the Hindu caste system)... and likewise the caste system is endorsed by the gods ("If there were no such thing as a caste system nobody would have written about it, even in works of fiction.").

Ironically, of course, "the existence of" a caste system is a direct refutation of the underpinnings of classical liberal ideas that justify the harnessing/indulgence of greed in a capitalist system.

Maybe one of these days a Vaishya avatar of Ganesha will come along to untie the knot of this thread of thought... but somehow I doubt it, despite your "proof" of the existence of avatars. ;)

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

31. I was speaking of human behavior, not of literal things.

The writers of ancient texts wrote about things people did and the way they behaved and the way they felt: they wrote about greed, love, lust, anger, fear, envy, all those qualities that still exist among human beings today. The point I was trying to make is that if ancient peoples had no concept of qualities such as greed, they wouldn't have written about them. That is simply not the same as assuming the existence of things: gods, avatars or the Easter Bunny, just because someone wrote about them.

[LooseWilly]

34. Behavior is a "thing". Qualities are "things". Greed is a "thing".

Adherence to the Kshatriya Yoga is a "quality"... but you want to gloss that over and assume that "Greed" is "Real" because it was written about, but "Caste" is not "Real" despite its having been written about... because, somehow, its existence as a "Thing" nullifies the "Exist"-ential reality of it as a "Quality"???

You can't have it both ways. Either the quality of "Caste" is a concept of equal "Exist" with the rest, or none of them "Exist" (in the strange Platonic sense of idealized "exist" with which you seem to want to use the word & concept).

"The writers of ancient texts wrote about things people did and the way they behaved and the way they felt: they wrote about greed, love, lust, anger, fear, envy, all those qualities that still exist among human beings today."— you forgot to include "caste" in your list of "all those qualities that still exist among humans today"... contrariwise, if it is "legitimate" to leave "caste" out of the list... then it is equally legitimate to leave out any of the other "qualities", such as "greed" for example, as being a quaint notion of the time that "doesn't really exist as a human quality"...

(And by the way, I would assert that the Easter Bunny "really exists" every bit as much as greed... simply because existence is an idea. Likewise, to the extent that one can "grow out of" believing in the Easter Bunny, one can likewise "grow out of" believing in greed. The credit fairy, on the other hand...)

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

35. Sorry, I now have no idea what you are trying to say.

[LooseWilly]

36. Ok, I will pare it down to it's most simple point: "caste" is a quality, like "greed"...

In the Bhagavad Gita "caste" is not a "thing" that teaches one how to shoot a bow, like Krishna is... or the Easter Bunny, to use your analogy for one of the main characters of the epic.

In the Bhagavad Gita, "caste" is an essential "quality" inherent in a person. One is Kshatriya just as much as one is "selfless", or "greedy".

Kshatriya, or Brahman, or Vaishya... is not a job. It is not a pair of pants. It is not the Easter Bunny or a "Mission from God". Caste is a quality inherent in a person in the Bhagavad Gita... and indeed throughout Hindu thought and writing.

If you are going to use the Bhagavad Gita's treatment of "greed" to illustrate that "greed has always been with us"... then you are also, in equal measure illustrating the fact that "caste has always been with us".

"Greed" is not a more real human quality than "Caste"... in the Bhagavad Gita.

That being the case— if "Caste" is not really a "Human Quality", then neitherwise is "Greed" really a "Human Quality".

So your own "proof" leaves you required to either acknowledge that greed isn't "real", or you have to acknowledge that caste is real.

(And as for your use of the Bible... Kosher and Maintaining the Sabbath and other commandments (no shellfish) are as apt to be punished by God as greed or any of the other "real" human qualities you listed. If you are going to use these Mythological Texts to justify your defense of the existence of greed as somehow "an inherent quality of human nature"... you'll also have to accept Caste, Covenant and Original Sin on an equal metaphysical footing.

Otherwise you're just engaging in a little ethnocentric picking-and-choosing style pillaging of the products of non-US cultures.)

[blindpig]

43. Greed is one of many human behavioral traits..

The trick is that capitalism promotes and encourages it. In another society where it is discouraged it will be treated the way we treat other character flaws, people will be admonished, corrected and all else failing shunned. There will be no mechanism by which it can do harm to society. Greed, imho, is an extension of infantile behavior, we can deal with that when it is toothless.

[True Earthling]

20. The rise of trade and commerce gave rise to cooperation and innovation...

Another pacifying force has been commerce, a game in which everybody can win. As technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners, other people become more valuable alive than dead. They switch from being targets of demonization and dehumanization to potential partners in reciprocal altruism.

For example, though the relationship today between America and China is far from warm, we are unlikely to declare war on them or vice versa. Morality aside, they make too much of our stuff, and we owe them too much money.

http://goo.gl/EKOw7


Evidence from recent Australian artifacts shows that long-distance movement of objects is a telltale sign of trade, not migration. We Africans have been doing this since at least 120,000 years ago. That's the date of beads made from marine shells found a hundred miles inland in Algeria. Trade is 10 times as old as agriculture.
Knowledge is dispersed and shared. Friedrich Hayek was the first to point out, in his famous 1945 essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society," that central planning cannot work because it is trying to substitute an individual all-knowing intelligence for a distributed and fragmented system of localized but connected knowledge. I find that the entire field of anthropology and archaeology needs Hayek badly. Their debates about what made human beings successful, and what caused the explosive take-off of human culture in the past 100,000 years, simply never include the insight of dispersed knowledge. They are still looking for a miracle gene, or change in brain organization, that explains, like a deus ex machina, the human revolution. They are still looking inside human heads rather than between them.

That is what trade does. It creates a collective innovating brain as big as the trade network itself. When you cut people off from exchange networks, their innovation rate collapses. Which is of course why the Internet is such an exciting development. For the first time humanity has not just some big collective brains, but one truly vast one in which almost everybody can share and in which distance is no obstacle.

The political implications are obvious: that human collaboration is necessary for society to work; that the individual is not—and has not been for 120,000 years—able to support his lifestyle; that trade enables us to work for each other not just for ourselves; that there is nothing so antisocial (or impoverishing) as the pursuit of self-sufficiency; and that authoritarian, top-down rule is not the source of order or progress.

http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/ancient-cloud

[Starry Messenger]

23. The need for communal labor for survival gave rise to innovation.

We are already a cooperative species.

You've cited the Wall Street Journal and a libertarian http://www.newstatesman.com/200303310037 named Matt Ridley for "evidence". Sorry, that's two strikes.

Ridleyed With Errors http://www.monbiot.com/2010/06/19/ridleyed-with-errors/
June 19, 2010
George Monbiot

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column for the Guardian exploring the contrast between Matt Ridley’s assertions in his new book The Rational Optimist and his own experience(1). In the book Ridley attacks the “parasitic bureaucracy” which stifles free enterprise and excoriates governments for, among other sins, bailing out big corporations. If only the market is left to its own devices, he insists, and not stymied by regulations, the outcome will be wonderful for everybody.

What Ridley glosses over is that before he wrote this book he had an opportunity to put his theories into practice. As chairman of Northern Rock, he was responsible, according to parliament’s Treasury select committee, for a “high-risk, reckless business strategy”. Northern Rock was able to pursue this strategy as a result of a “substantial failure of regulation” by the state(2). The wonderful outcome of this experiment was the first run on a British bank since 1878, and a £27bn government bail-out.

But it’s not just Ridley who doesn’t mention the inconvenient disjunction between theory and practice: hardly anyone does. His book has now been reviewed dozens of times, and almost all the reviewers have either been unaware of his demonstration of what happens when his philosophy is applied or too polite to mention it. The reason, as far as I can see, is that Ridley is telling people – especially rich, powerful people – what they want to hear.

He tells them that they needn’t worry about social or environmental issues, because these will sort themselves out if the market is liberated from government control. He tells them that they are right to assert that government should get off their backs and stop interfering with its pettifogging rules and regulations: they should be left alone to make as much money as they like, however they like. He tells them that poorly-regulated greed of the kind that he oversaw at Northern Rock is in fact a great moral quest, which makes the world a better place. I expect the executives of BP have each ordered several copies.

[True Earthling]

37. The exchange of goods and ideas through trade did more for survival...

I.e. When a tribe who solely hunted encountered a tribe who primarily fished, trading spears for fishing nets doubled the available resources and doubled the likelihood of survival for both.

[Starry Messenger]

38. Resource sharing/swapping is not "commerce".

Nice try though.

[True Earthling]

39. Trading is not commerce?

What's your definition?

[Starry Messenger]

40. Commerce:

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/commerce

1. The buying and selling of goods, especially on a large scale, as between cities or nations. See Synonyms at business.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce

While business refers to the value-creating activities of an organization for profit, commerce means the whole system of an economy that constitutes an environment for business. The system includes legal, economic, political, social, cultural, and technological systems that are in operation in any country. Thus, commerce is a system or an environment that affects the business prospects of an economy or a nation-state. We can also define it as a second component of business which includes all activities, functions and institutions involved in transferring goods from producers to consumers <1>.

[True Earthling]

41. The trade of goods vs. buying and selling of goods... same thing.

They both achieve the same results. In the case of the spears for nets tade... both groups profit. If it was a net neutral transaction for either party there would be no incentive to trade. Both traders in a barter system and both buyer and seller would not agree unless it were in their self interest to do so.

In the buyer/seller scenario, a person who sells a piece of furniture may use the money to buy a computer. In their mind it's a profitable transaction in the end. The utility and convenience of money adds one moe step but it beats having to lug furniture down to the local computer store and then the computer store having to trade that furniture with their supplier etc.

In the spears for nets post I did not mention "commerce". Do you disagree with the statement that trade is beneficial for survival and promotes the spread of ideas? Trade between hunter gatherers/ tribal societies has a much older history than agriculture.

[Starry Messenger]

42. Words have meanings TE.

Tribal sharing and trade do not at all have the same social function as commerce, which is protected by the state for the benefit of a few. You are trying to blend one social phenomena with a defense of the parasitical "free market". Go peddle it to someone else. You've already bandied Hayek around (via Ridley) which is about as right-wing as you can get.

[True Earthling]

44. I'm more interested in the origin of human behavior...

from an evolutionary point of view. To understand evolution is to know our true identity and all meaningful knowledge of our roots. I am always open to be convinced by new facts or information... I would love to hear your rebuttal of Ridley's observations.

Do you believe commerce in it's present form is a zero sum game... one party wins the other loses?

[Starry Messenger]

45. I guess you are counting on the mods not knowing who F. Hayek is.

Hayek, Friedman and all of their mutant children eventually trip up here though. Good luck! :hi:

[True Earthling]

46. Go ahead and alert the mods...

I freely admit that I am not Socialist, Marxist or Communist. Obviously we disagree about human nature and the root cause of social problems. If you believe that's grounds for banishment... have at it.

[no_hypocrisy]

5. It came with hoarding and the ability to "protect" what one hoarded

as opposed to sharing when you had more than you needed.

[Coyote_Bandit]

6. I'd say you are about half right

There are two motivations for greed:

(1) Fear of not having enough or losing what one has and

(2) The desire for more whether as a symbol of domination or success or as a means to feel secure.

[Bacchus39]

7. competition has always been a part of survival

whether it be for a mate, food resource, territory, habitat, water, or dominance expressed through violence.

[KansDem]

16. But "competition" within rules and standards.

For example, I often hear about "survival of the fittest" and how capitalism embraces this notion. Work hard and smart(ly) and you will succeed!

However, those "rules and standards" are fast eroding as we reward criminals more and more while they hoard more and more.

If we really had a "survival of the fittest," I should be able to take a gun into a large house and blow away its occupants. Then I could move my family in and relish the "survival of the fittest"...at least until another person with a gun decides to take my house.

So we establish laws for the preservation of humanity. And we practice rules of civility to live in safe and secure communities.

The current crop of hoarders, however, have overlooked these rules and standards in their acquisition of more and more wealth. I think that's the foundation for the current angst in the country today...

[Bacchus39]

21. yes, I was referring to the OP's theory when competition entered into the equation

its an innate behavioral and ecological trait. it didn't all of a sudden happen when humans became agrarian.

economic darwinism is only a good analogy only if you're are talking about survival Its misapplied to the biggest and baddest whether that be an animal or a company. however, it actually means long term survival and passing on your genes to offspring. so really a small company that has been in business for 70 years has greater "fitness" than say an Enron if the analogy to evolution is applied more appropriately.

[lunatica]

9. Greed is about acquiring power over others

I think it's a mental pathology. Sociopaths naturally rise to the top because their greed for power drives them. And they never have enough power so they find they need to keep that power by ever increasing violence. No one becomes a dictator like Saddam Hussein or Hitler by accident. Only by hard work and design and manipulation and cruelty.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

10. No dispute here.

[SpiralHawk]

12. The tradition on Turtle Island (North America)

...in most cultures, was to share. One earned honor and status as a result of generosity - the Giveaway.

Bunch of FreePereans (R - Yesteryear) came across the sea and trashed that concept in short order.

[True Earthling]

15. If the starving tribe on the other side of the hill had something of value to trade

for the excessive inventory of the hoarding tribe... problem solved.... no war is necessary. Otherwise nature will select for the survival of the hoarding tribe while the starving tribe will go extinct. That's how natural selection works... the innovative, smart tribe who accumulates more resources than they need in the short term to insure their survival during lean periods in the long term survive over the tribe who did not develop the predictive sense to make the same adjustment.

Trade is the key for disparate tribes to maintain peaceful relationships and ensure survival of both. When a tribe who solely hunted encountered a tribe who primarily fished, trading excess spears for excess fishing nets doubled the available resources and likelihood of survival for each.

[FarCenter]

18. Read The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

by Francis Fukuyama. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

He does a comparative analysis of political systems, including the economic aspects. Humans have always lived in kinship groups that involve complex social interactions, and the rational, self-interested "economic man" of both classical and socialist economic theories is a poor approximation to our evolved characteristics.

I haven't read it, but David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years was interviewed on TV. He describes how systems of credit actually predate money.

[Gman]

22. It's probably linked to the same thing as food aggression in dogs.

[lumberjack_jeff]

26. It's all about getting girls.

Guys seek ostentatious riches because it makes them more attractive.

Don't believe me? Two words: Keith Richards.

But you're right, unlike food or drink, there's no "enough" switch built into us.

I show in the first place that the state of men without civil society (which state may be called the state of nature) is nothing but a war of all against all; and that in that war, all have a right to all things. - Thomas Hobbes

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

28. There's a limit to that.

I can't imagine the amount of money that would induce me to do Keith Richards.

[LooseWilly]

32. My theory on the origins of greed: Some people are assholes.

It's really as simple as that.

Evolutionary responses to scarcity of resources would also justify homicidal mania (by killing people wholesale one would increase the per capita resource quotient, thereby eliminating the problem of scarcity... increasingly successfully as more and more people are killed).

That, in and of itself, completely dismisses the scarcity of resources argument as reasonable or compelling as far as I'm concerned. (Or, to be more precise, that denigrates that justification of greed to an equal level of validity with its justification of homicidal mania... and so, to the extent that one is willing to accept this argument as justifying greed I would likewise insist on the equal justification of homicidal mania... and if some greedy SOB has a problem with that, I am going to kill him/her, and feel good about it.)

On the other hand... if one just treats the greedy the way one would treat any other variety of asshole one has to deal with, then one is bound to suffer a lesser sense of cognitive dissonance while going about one's day. (And, those who serve on the jury of people accused of killing the greedy will be more apt to determine that it was a justifiable homicide... making it a better world, one death at a time. :) )