I know. Per your definition, anyone who desires a vacation to a tropical island is greedy. Or eating at restaurants. Playing video games, renting a movie, eating dessert, etc. How about living on the California coast? People who want to earn more so they can move there are greedy? Or do they simply desire it?

One of my cousins' parents immigrated to the Bay Area, but mine went to the midwest. Am I greedy for desiring to earn income more than a couple standard deviations above the mean so that I could buy land in the Bay Area? Is my cousin not greedy because they were born there?

>Context and our norms is what determines it.

Exactly, which is the problem with trying to distinguish "desire" and "greed". "We" don't have norms. I was lambasted growing up by my grandparents for wanting things that any 1990s kid had in the US, but they didn't have in their poorer country from 1920 to 1940.

> Greed is the impulse to rig the game once you’ve won a little, so you can keep extracting more without competing.

You're making up your own novel definition of greed there, which is certainly cheating when you're saying Milton Friedman is wrong. He was using greed in a more generally accepted sense, ie, a desire for more than one has right now.

There are a lot of greedy people out there who are scrupulously honest. As far as I can tell, the average greedy person should be modelling scrupulous honesty, advocating fair systems and enforcing rule-following behaviours - that is creating the best environment for acquiring capital and maintaining property rights. Greedy people who white-ant the systems sustaining their capital are generally more stupid than greedy.

A typical example here might be something like chess. The primary reason people play it is competition and enjoyment of the game. But there are some who a distorted mentality and simply want to win, even if they're not the one's doing anything, and so you get things like people using computers to cheat. And online chess sites (and increasingly even major over the board events) only work so well by making sure that these sort of people are completely removed from the game.

The desire to compete is somehow not really the same as the desire to win. This is overtly apparent in things like body building. 99.9% of body builders will never compete in a body building show, let alone win, but enjoy the journey that's mostly full of years of self inflicted pain, occasional injury, and endless dedication - largely for the sake of competition and of course what it does to your body. And that latter part isn't really about showing off or sex or whatever, but simply about pride in what you've accomplished - much in the same way one might take pride in their ability to play chess well, or manage a healthy business.

You're splitting stupid hairs here over the exact implication of words in a setting where they don't exactly matter. Whether you call it greed, self interest, a desire to amass wealth, etc, doesn't really matter because for the fat part of the bell curve it's all the same.