but to sum up, there's good greed (healthy levels of incentives, keep the economy going) and there's too much greed (like how many cars do you really need or how many pairs of shoes or whatever). The larger problem with the Michael Douglas/Wall Street message is that it was distorted and out of balance and was being used to justify bad actions.

During the 80s (The Decade of Greed and the decade that the movie Wall Street was made), there was a rash of mergers and acquisitions, a lot of corporate "downsizing" and layoffs and a lot of unhappy people because of these. I recall that at the time that TWA was taken over, a lot of routes were abandoned because they weren't profitable, which meant that a lot of flight attendants were laid off. The flight attendants picketed -- not just TWA, but also the investment bank that had found the financiers for the takeover. The media made a big deal out of the poor flight attendants and, granted, it's horrible to be laid off from a job. But TWA was really hurting, otherwise it wouldn't have been a takeover target. So the choice may have been between laying off a big group of flight attendants and other staff members, or closing down entirely -- which would have cost a lot more jobs. It was this kind of scenario that was played up by the makers of Wall Street, but without asking the harder questions of "What alternatives are there?" and "Who's going to pay that person's salary?"

I like to think that I am a good person, one who thinks about the larger perspective and tries to make a difference. But I'm not completely selfless -- comfort is important to me. So is appearance. So I'm driven at least in part by greed and vanity. And I do try to be realistic.

The basic corporate structure has a small centralized management (the officers of the corporation -- the president or CEO, for example, who is visible to the community as The Corporation), and a large decentralized ownership (shareholders. Each person who owns a share of a corporation is a part owner of that corporation, because each share represents a teensy little ownership percentage -- usually a teensy percent of a percent of ownership). The corporation's mandate is to generate profits, which are paid to the owners of the company (the shareholders) as dividends. A shareholder who believes that the company is being mismanaged can bring an action (not easy and expensive, but doable in the right circumstances) to replace the officers if they are not creating profits -- dividends. Most state statutes that govern corporations require that all profits be paid in dividends (although you can keep a small amount back for contingencies and working capital and stuff). So, by law, you have to give out dividends if you've got profits, and you have to earn profits or basically you'll lose your job if you're a company officer.

So, is greed good? I think it's morally neutral up to a certain point. It's built into the system. Profits are the way we judge the value of a corporation. Corporations are owned by individuals (lots and lots of individuals). So the idea of the big bad corporation doing mean things to nice unsuspecting individuals is kind of inapt, because it's those very individuals that are providing the incentive for the corporation to create and distribute profits, sometimes by means of cutbacks and layoffs.

It's true that we would have to re-think the whole structure in order to change this around. Several people who post regularly on this board have ideas about how we would go about that. But honestly, I'm in agreement with those who believe that the first effect of this would be a major recession or depression. I still believe that we should think globally but act locally.

Peace.