Greed Is (Not) Good

Greed is (not) Good

Greed. Just the word itself, sitting on the open page, looks forboding. It conjures up mental scripts ranging from Scrooge McDuck (Donald’s miserly uncle), to several characters in Charles Dickens’ often quaint and convenient novels (most notably the one of Christmas woes). It is a word often associated with gluttony, excess, narcissism and the Seven Deadly sins—not exactly a great crowd to be caught hanging out with on a Saturday night…especially if one of them is conspiring to swing in to church the next morning, and commit simony. I am fairly certain that greed began or has its roots in the original sister cities of sin, Sodom and Gomorrah. I have absolutely no proof of this, it is merely a feeling, or a stirring perhaps, in my loins. The view that ‘Greed is Good’ is not only foolish, it is borderline blasphemy, and I will discuss the tenets of this in my following essay. In this essay, however, I will deal directly with the phrase, or mantra, ‘Greed is Good’.

The Biblical translation of the word ‘greed’, is “excessive desire”. This would not have been my first choice. As far as definitions go, it seems a bit tame, until you consider the definition of the word ‘fat’. The defimition (or one of them, anyway) for ‘fat’ is excessive weight. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I consider a person with excessive weight, I think of the 600 pound guy from Pennsylvania that firefighters and rescue workers had to remove from his home by removing the exterior wall of his house—that is just the first thing that comes to mind . The second thing that comes to mind, I do not wish to discuss here, other than to say I saw it at The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow in the early ‘90’s—yeah, you should probably just trust me on this one…In comparison to that, I think ‘excessive’ holds up pretty well. In fact, the Scripture’s even go so far as to warn Christians not to keep the company of a greedy person. In light of this, how a...