greed.

In legal today we watched a video on Greed in America and it was super interesting. Of course we had an in-class quiz about it--ethics, profit, legality and such. One question said 'Is greed in America bad? To which many people would probably say 'yes of course--hello, greed, corporate evilness, poor ethics, etc. Greed = Bad.' But John Stossel is a smart guy, and throughout the video he made several good points:

"Greed motivates most of us to work harder, to innovate, and to cooperate with each other. More importantly, it motivates those few creative geniuses among us, on whom everything else depends, to bring to life the new ideas that move the whole world forward." I definitely could not have said it better myself. But how can you justify having 100 million dollar homes when many people have no home? True, that's an issue. But can you say that those with expensive homes and billions of dollars are getting a bigger piece of the economic pie? It doesn't really work to say that because person A gets more of the pie, persons B and C are going to get less.

Objectivist philosopher David Kelley said this. "Because greedy people get rich, they appear to be getting a bigger piece of the economic pie at the expense of everyone else. What is missing from that perception is that greedy people make whole new pies--including products that never existed before, like high-speed computers and lifesaving medical treatments."

So logically it's good for me to be selfish? That's a scary thought. But I see their point.