Greed and The Desire to Acquire: It’s Not a Zero-Sum Game

By Robert Ringer - Monday, May 14, 2012

Some years ago, Time magazine ran a cover story about greed that stated, “Nature is a zero-sum game, after all. Every buffalo you kill for your family is one less for somebody else’s; every acre of land you occupy elbows out somebody else.”

Ignorant, left-wing college profs have been teaching this kind of gibberish to malleable-minded college kids for centuries, while at the same time shameless and ignorant politicians have been brainwashing the parents of those same children. Sadly, this kind of Marxist rhetoric is precisely what deters the underprivileged from doing the very things they need to do to lift themselves up.

Long before the media invented a kinder, gentler Michelle Obama and created a let’s-pretend project (the “anti–childhood obesity campaign”) for her, she blurted out her now-famous hammer-and-sickle comment, “Someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.” In politically incorrect circles, this is a euphemism for communism.

The idea of being forced to give up some of your pie assumes not only that the size of the pie is fixed, but that there is only one pie, which I like to affectionately refer to as the Michelle Pie. Attention mentally challenged progressives: There is no limit to the number of pies that can be baked.

The only way to stop the entrepreneur from baking more pies is through government force. Lacking that, he will continue to bake more and more pies that he believes people will like — and buy — and everyone will benefit from his “selfish” efforts.

Tinseltown celebs, of course, are also quite vocal when it comes to the class-warfare con, as evidenced by George Clooney’s recent $15 million fundraiser on behalf of Der Fuhrbama. But since they have such large slices of the pie themselves, most people don’t take the showbiz crowd seriously.

In truth, any honest, half-intelligent person in this day and age of highly visible entrepreneurial wealth creation certainly realizes that neither nature nor business nor life itself is a zero-sum game. In every country where the zero-sum game has been played out, the results have been catastrophic.

The list of such countries includes the former Soviet Union, Albania, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, China, North Korea, Cuba, and Mozambique, among others. And everyone on the list has three things in common: torture, suffering, and equal misery for the masses, special treatment for the anointed privileged class, and failed economies.

Unfortunately, Western societies seem intent on following the loud voices of the zero-sum crowd down an egalitarian path that leads to dictatorship. What these envy-driven fools cannot seem to grasp is that those who create wealth almost always do so by creating value for others.

Or, to continue the metaphor, they increase the size of the pie. That’s why the poorest families in the U.S. have the means to buy state-of-the-art television sets, DVD players, video-game consoles, computers, cell phones, and an endless array of other electronic products that are strictly discretionary in nature — i.e., they are not necessities by any stretch of the imagination.

Greed is technically defined as “an excessive desire to acquire more than what one needs or deserves.” But who, other than Michael Moore, has the wisdom, let alone the moral authority, to decide what anyone else needs or deserves?

Since the words “excessive” and “more than what he needs or deserves” are totally subjective, what greed really means is possessing a desire to acquire. And though it may ruffle the feathers of many to hear it, the reality is that all human beings have an unlimited desire to acquire.

One person might desire to acquire power over others by leading or joining a humanitarian crusade. Another person might desire to acquire material wealth by providing products or services that people are willing to purchase from him. And still another individual might desire to acquire the respect of others through artistic endeavors.

In any event, all of these people are “greedy” in the sense that they “desire to acquire.” Thus, ambition is simply “a strong desire to achieve something,” and “acquire” is commonly used as a synonym for “achieve.”

Though the audience was set up to hiss and boo when Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 movie Wall Street, spewed out those now-famous words “Greed is good,” the fact is that he was absolutely right. Or at least conditionally right. Greed is good if it leads to honest wealth creation.

In truth, greed is neither good nor bad; it’s neutral. It is only the methods that a person employs to fulfill his desires that are good or bad. Just as guns don’t kill people, neither does greed, of and by itself, harm anyone. So long as you do not use force or fraud to acquire what you desire, you never need to apologize for being greedy.

Keep all this in mind over the next six months as the Master of Distraction hammers away at the importance of making the “wealthy” pay their “fair share.” It is nothing more than a distraction from his real objective: bringing an end to the last vestiges of liberty that Americans still enjoy.

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Copyright © 2012 Robert Ringer
ROBERT RINGER is a New York Times #1 bestselling author and host of the highly acclaimed Liberty Education Interview Series, which features interviews with top political, economic, and social leaders. He has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business, The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, The Lars Larson Show, ABC Nightline, and The Charlie Rose Show, and has been the subject of feature articles in such major publications as Time, People, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Barron's, and The New York Times.