Profit seeking through competition isn’t the same as greed. Greed is the impulse to rig the game once you’ve won a little, so you can keep extracting more without competing. And that tendency from some kinds of people corrodes free market capitalism and its ability to drive innovation and reduce prices. Competition only works if players play by the rules.

And your food analogy works against you. If we extend your analogy, profit is like eating, greed is like overeating. Saying profit = greed is like saying every person who eats three meals a day is a glutton. Competition rewards healthy eating -- efficiency, balance, discipline. Greed is scarfing down the pantry and locking the fridge so nobody else can eat.

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roenxi 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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chuckadams 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Economists really should read more Adam Smith: for every word he wrote on free markets, he wrote five more on ethics and morality.

	▲	jhbadger 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Newton wrote more about alchemy and theology than he did on physics too. There's a reason why Newton and Smith are primarily remembered in a subset of the fields they worked in.
	▲	da_chicken 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And, boy, has he got opinions on landlords!

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Teever 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Give me your definition of greed.

	▲	roenxi 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I did. "a desire for more than one has right now" If you want a dictionary definition, search suggests "An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth". On their own neither of those implies any desire to rig games or to avoid competition. Some greedy people do that, but since pretty much everyone is greedy to some extent you find greedy people with every combination of human characteristics.

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schmidtleonard 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's hilarious to watch people try to pretend that "crony capitalism" and "capitalism" are different things, as if the greed to rig the system once you've won is fundamentally different from the greed that pushes you to compete in an un-rigged system.

No, sorry, it's not only the same emotion, it's the same system and the same rules: if greed is good, why shouldn't one seek network effects, platform effects, last-mile dynamics, vertical and horizontal integration that block competition, engage in FUD and dumping and regulatory capture and so on and so on? The answer that the entire business community and an increasing fraction of the general population seems to agree to is that one should, and this has prevented the sort of gardening that can keep the system actually competitive and working for the people, rather than working for the people on top, which is what it overwhelmingly wants to do when left to its own devices.

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somenameforme 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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potato3732842 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	Teever 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		No. Greed and competitiveness are two different motivators, and free market capitalism is driven by competition and not greed. People compete for many reasons and the collection of material wealth is only one of them.