To paraphrase Forrest Gump, "I'm not a smart man, but I know what dumb is."  One of the dumbest things being said, particularly in Washington, is that greed caused the current financial meltdown. Nonsense.  Greed is just a cheap shot, a catch phrase, for people pursuing self interest.  And self interest, greed if you will, is responsible for every good thing that we take for granted in our everyday lives.  Absent greed, no one would take risk or innovate and all progress would stop.  Just look at human history.  More wealth has been created and more improvement in the human condition has taken place worldwide in the past 200 years than in all of human history combined.  For 5000 years history was a story of conquest and superstition and kings and emperors causing death and mayhem for glory and empire.  Enter free market capitalism, kings fall from power, and greed creates the modern world including much longer life spans, too many conveniences to count, and the defeat of diseases that used to kill just about everyone.

I am 53 years old.  200 years ago if I were even alive I would have been considered an old man. Today I am fit, in perfect health, and am looking forward to decades more life. All of that is an outgrowth of a free market, making everything available to me from fitness to a safe food supply to more time to work on myself - free from the daily struggles of just trying to feed myself or provide shelter, the primary pursuit of mankind before free market capitalism. In fact, it is still the primary pursuit of those folks unfortunate enough to still live in countries where free markets don't exist. Greed drives free markets and the inevitable result of free markets is innovation and a better life for everyone that lives in them.

Meanwhile, the republicrats in Washington (and to my mind there is only one major political party and the seeming debate between democrats and republicans is just theatre), agree that more regulation of the free market is needed and are debating only the extent of the new rules. Mind you, as I have written here many times before, the current disaster was created by the very rules that they created in the first place, but the only solution that they all agree upon is that we need more rules. You can read that to mean we need these republicrats to rule over us for our own good and that all progress needs them to protect fairness.  Fairness is an ugly word because it is code for government controlling your life.

What we really need is more greed.  We need virtually no rules for private innovators and risk takers to create new wealth and opportunities.  It was greed that created all drugs that protect us, all the devices that we love like iPhones and HD TVs, cars, clothes, a vast food supply, the homes we live in, and well, everything that makes life great.  The list of innovations created by supposedly altruistic government is, well, nothing at all.  They have only "innovated" in creating piles of programs that don't work debt that we cannot pay, money that is constantly devaluing and distorting markets, and a tax code that for the individual returns alone contain over 4 million words of instructions! 

Holy Cow, how do these venal idiots keep getting elected?!