So intoned the character Gordon Gecko loosely based on Boesky in the film Wall St.

“Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed -- you mark my words -- will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”

Except, of course, that it doesn’t. Gecko, like Boesky, was a morality tale. We don’t pay much attention to them or the lesson of their short sightedness. We’ve been trying for years to take simply what we want without paying the price.

There’s a perverse symmetry to the fact that what will get us out of Iraq and finally end this corrupt administration and its corrosive influence on the constitution, civil rights and ethics is—greed.

You will have Bear Stearns to thank for getting us out of Iraq—how ironic is that?! We seem to get that we can’t afford both a war and an economy that’s sinking on the weakened dollar and no credit.

What’s bothering me is not how wedded everyone seems to their own position but the lack of importance they attach to other’s arriving at differing conclusions. I value your ability to make your choice slightly more than I value the choice I’ve arrived at. I still wish decisions were made with a little more vision towards the overall consequences and a little sense of awe regarding the responsibilities we have and the interconnectedness of those decisions and responsibilities.

I wish we’d each of us doubt a little of our own infallibility and think a little more about us—collectively—I wish we’d think a little more expansively about what we need to do and the effects it has on more than our subset of wants.

I wish we were a little broader in our thinking.

Because greed… it’s not working so well.

I hear what you are saying, but can you be more explicit about who is wedded to what, and what the differing conclusions could be? I am not 100% following you.

I personaly do not blame Iraq for our economic troubles. Not wholy or even directly.

That has more to do with banking deregulation, FNMA style subsidies, exploding derivative instrument, low real interest rates, the looting of the middle class, and the betrayal of shareholders.

Iraq is just a part of that. Defense spending is usualy stimulative as well. It;s just that the linkage has been broken in this offshoring crony era.

Black standup comic's sexual innuendo. But, then, I like that.

Sure. I’m saying that many of the people who are advocating for their position or reaching a conclusion do so with disdain and contempt for other positions—even ones with other commonalities. I find that distressing both because I don’ think most people can really afford that degree of certainty in their conclusions and because blanket condemnation of differing conclusions devalues other peoples’ need to make moral decisions of their own. It eliminates the heft to the process of moral decision making. There are plenty of conclusions I reach that I would attempt to persuade others make sense but that’s not the same as holding differing views in contempt or feeling the need to control those differing views.

The McCain rather than Obama thing (given the commonalities of the Clinton Obama platforms and the candidates express backing and positions) is just one of many manifestations of this. I just feel we can (as a nation) ill afford pique.

I’m also saying that the narrow scope of focus in regards to the few number of issues considered (single issue voting , for example) concerns me because many issues have ripple effects that cumulatively (I believe) have significant impacts that are overlooked to ill effect.

Oh—and Iraq is a (I think) a pretty big part of it. When you destabilize the middle east and weaken the dollar soaring oil costs are unsurprising and ripple throughout the economy; with the looting of the housing bubble it just creates a firestorm in a dry tinder box. Going to war in the 70s without a war time economic footing has similar stagflationary results.

I guess what I’m saying is that I think that a broader range of considerations, economic, immigration, civil rights, constitution protections and many other issues would have served us well and lead us away from a lot of policies that had shorter term and shortsighted payoffs. It hasn’t served us well and pique is unlikely to know.

The traders I know are standing pat until they see what the (in their opinion Obama) monetary teams of the next administration stake out as regulatory ground before structuring their trading operations. Smart money is on minimum mandated cash positions for investment banks tied to the derivative risk to prevent another Bear Stearns. Would have to go through IMF instead of Fed for international instruments.

I just thought you had something specific in mind.

The pathologies and rigid identity politics going on are a symptom. We are regressing as a nation, right before our eyes. Right out of Lord of the Flies. Everyone take two giant steps backwards. Happened in Germany 1930s. Happened in Serbia 1990s. Its happening here now.

I read these Hillary post and they could so easily be writtten by Rush Limbaugh fans about some other topic. Tantrums of arrested emotional development. Nothing more.

Corporatism is the root here (and attendant anti democratic subversion). Root of the media that fans the flames of rigid pissing contests. Root of a system that infantilizes all of us. Root of the war too.

I could be wrong about corporatism, but like my daddy used to say everytime I was in trouble and said it was someone else's fault: I know son, none of it is your fault, it's just that you are the one standing there every time something bad happens.

is that it is impatient. There's nothing inherently wrong with wanting it all, there is with wanting it all now. We continue to ransom our future to forestall the inevitable payment for our extravagance. That is the debilitating, almost mind-numbing effect of our adventures in Iraq.

We can fiddle with interest rates, we can fiddle with taxes, we can even fiddle with the books themselves, but eventually the fiddler must be paid. Greed invites us to the party and then always mysteriously disappears when it's time to pick up the tab.

that I subscribe to your all-encompassing view of corporatism, but your daddy's line was pretty damn good. I might have to plagiarize that one sometime.

...or, at least, greed (more properly, self-interest) has value from an evolutionary psychology aspect.

Our reptile brain still calls the primal shots, still answer to greed and feed and survival and retaliation and essential self-interest, more in some than others, which speaks to individual evolution, which is another story.

Consider this. Altruism itself is a form of self-interest, greed. When people risk their own lives to rescue another, they are responding to a biological imperative to continue the breed, race, genus. Altruism makes no biological/psychological sense otherwise.
Altruism is self-interest, a form of greed.

That noted, the greedy bastards now running your country and mine and many others are a cabal in throes of a doctrine of self-interest beyond anything imagined by the Creator of beneficial primality; have emerged from the other side like chest-eating Aliens destroying everything they infect; need to be stopped before they conquer Earth, like Ripley stopped Aliens in fiction.

Good allegory, that; good metaphor.

But I really liked this, Demosthenes:

"I still wish decisions were made with a little more vision towards the overall consequences and a little sense of awe regarding the responsibilities we have and the interconnectedness of those decisions and responsibilities."

That statement could apply to any human interaction, and should be enshrined.

His comment shouldn't surprise you. When you get down to it, he is a hopeless Christian despite his Jesuit training.

Nothing wrong with Christians, or Jesuits; it's just that the mandate to prosletize kills more than helps, even with good intent, be it racist or global "vision".

Well, and then there is this maddening impulse to look for the common good.

for the oil and health insurance companies. It indeed worked for the top one percent of the financial pyramid--who in fact saw their incomes and net worth rise significantly--especially after tax. Greed just didn't work for the country as a whole. But the link between the elites and a couple sectors and the nation has always been very tenuous despite continued Republican efforts to convince us--ever since 'What's good for GM is good for the country' was trotted out in the 1920s.

As for Iraq being an example of greed, I think not. Iraq was instead a reckless gamble: that we would occupy the world's second largest oil reserves smack dab in the middle of the world's oil patch on a risky premise--that WMDs would be found, or failing that, that we could whip Iraq into political shape and avert a civil war which had been predicted by Bush's father's wise men. Bush and Cheney were gamblers, and their gamble didn't pan out. The real greed was domestic: for the first time in history the rich got a tax cut as the country marched to war. The rich thought they could get a bloody divorce from the fiscal fortunes of the nation.

Pssst.....the Wright Brothers weren't looking for some touchey-feely awards and a pat on the back from Greenpeace when they invented that noisy, carbon belching little device known as the aeroplane...they were looking to get rich....

We the Living.

Forget the philosophy for a moment and accept the brute fact.

I wish we were a little less broad in our thinking and spent more time, instead, on interpretative history.

Don't you think, in writing your post, you should have taken this potential response into account? I mean you were dead many centuries before I was born - it's not like this thrust is something new.

I would think the experience of riding a bike downhill is what encouraged them to invent the airplane.

I may be biased, I was steeped in the lore of the Wright Brothers being in elementary school in a town called Kettering, a suburb of Dayton, named for another noted inventor whose brilliance you probably use several times a day.