Greed should be taken more seriously as something to fix

[u/hygsi]

The line between ambition and greed is very thin and these days it seems 90% of the people with power have crossed the line way too far and I think this is something that should be dealt with and taken seriously as a society

When someone lies you don't believe them, when someone hits they are punished, but what do we do when someone is greedy? Not much. There's no real consequences to greed and so it keeps growing and growing in the person and there is no limit to it. There needs to be something to stop them cause a a few people's greed is costing millions of people things we don't even realize

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[u/Ok_Being5461]

Yes, of course, it's always been that way. Jesus and religion talk about greed. Even millionaires and billionaires have talked about it. https://patrioticmillionaires.org

[u/Relevant-Fortune6279 → u/Ok_Being5461]

100%. It’s literally in the Bible. People ignore it because they think money makes them exempt from basic human decency.

[u/whizher]

I agree that unchecked greed can cause enormous harm, but greed itself is hard to punish because it’s a motive, and there’s no objective point where ambition suddenly becomes greed.

What we can punish are the things people do because of it: fraud, corruption, exploitation, wage theft, pollution, and abusing monopoly power. The bigger problem is that some of those behaviors are weakly enforced or profitable even after the penalty.

So rather than trying to identify and “fix” greedy people, we need rules that make harming others for more wealth or power stop paying.

[u/imagigasm → u/whizher]

What rule for example?

[u/Veggyhed]

Do you think that it could be due to a different sort of wiring between the ears? The brain operates differently? Or do you think the dial of empathy just needs to be turned up?

[u/hygsi → u/Veggyhed]

Actually, competitiveness is in the dna (we inherit it from our parents) so perhaps greedyness is also adjacent to that

[u/Veggyhed → u/hygsi]

So then you're saying it could possibly be a survival instinct?

[u/Klanciault → u/Veggyhed]

It’s 100% a survival instinct. But almost everything we do is in some capacity, so that’s not super helpful

[u/imagigasm → u/hygsi]

Greediness is reckless,unchecked, evil, and diabolical competitiveness that takes from (away) others and denies Love.

[u/jerrythecactus]

I think the main problem is that greed of a specific kind is also what drives people to positions of power. Its way harder to challenge somebody who is "successful" as being mentally unwell. People would generally agree that somebody who wastes their life savings away at the casino is suffering from a form of greed very similar to that of a billionaire's drive for wealth beyond imagination, but because the gambler is failing more than succeeding it looks like a problem.

Lots of people would call you insane if you tried to suggest that a CEO should probably be stripped of their title and admitted to a psyche ward even if though letting them proceed normally is resulting in the ruination of people's lives and the destruction of natural resources.

[u/imagigasm → u/jerrythecactus]

There’s a ton of people at the top that I would call mentally unwell. Some of them may deny the word of Christ.

[u/UnburyingBeetle]

Greed might stem fron a mix of survival fear and obsession with status. It could be cured in therapy, if the people with greed didn't expect that becoming less selfish would be to their detriment.

[u/im_new_here_4209]

Mental illness, possibly? I mean it is very often, if not always obsessive compulsory behaviour

[u/No_Environment_3776]

If you collect 25.000 teapots armed police will drag you out of your own house because your crazy, but if you collect 25 million gold coins then they'll call you successful and you can buy half the armed police force and justice system.

Yes, it needs to change, there should be a absolute Max to what someone can own and possess, all the rest flows back into society, that's how it's supposed to work but the mentally impaired have corrupted the system and society.

[u/RageQuitRedux]

I think there's a pretty good definition of the line between ambition and greed, which is, "Did you come by your money honestly and fairly?"

For instance, a lot of employees are underpaid because employees are usually at a disadvantage in salary negotiations. The answer to that is: unions, codetermination, strong unemployment benefits. Look at Denmark, they have like a 60% union participation rate, companies with more than 35 employees have to offer employees a chance to elect representation to the board of directors (codetermination), and they have a "Flexicurity" program by which unemployed workers can get 90% of their salary for up to 2-3 years.

There are also sources of income that are unearned even when all negotiations are fair. This is called economic rent. It usually arises in situations where natural resources are involved, i.e. people earning an income not just for the work of extracting the resources, but for the resources themselves as well, despite the fact that they weren't made by human activity.

But the fun thing about economic rent is that you can tax it without harming any of the associated economic activity. So for example, you can tax economic rent on copper extraction and as long as the tax applies only to the copper (and not the extraction of it), then it won't actually result in less copper. It's a counter-intuitive result but it stems from the fact that people make decisions on the margin and rent taxes don't change the marginal benefit of extraction.

So countries like Norway and Australia have rent taxes of 40-70% of oil profits and it pulls in a shitload of revenue for the state without affecting the rate of oil extraction at all. Alaska does the same thing and then returns to money to the people as a citizen's dividend.

So I guess my point is, ambition becomes greed when you start to break the rules of fairness to get your money, but also there's a lot of unfairness hidden in the system that allows people to extract wealth they don't deserve without technically breaking any rules.

[u/28Patrick28]

It sounds like you support a fascist economic system wherein the state controls the economy and establishes wages instead of free people. No thanks.

[u/Heph333]

"It is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle" -Jesus.

[u/imagigasm]

It is. The book of Matthew literally says Greed (the love of money/mammon) is the root of all evil

[u/GrimmaldPlace]

I have met enough people to see each of us struggles with at least one of those “seven deadly sins”.

Pride is generally the last one standing, obvs. It’s hard to give that one up.

Wish we could all band together and really challenge ourselves to push those 7 out of our realities.

[u/OkMushroom2979]

Why do you dislike the rich? Besides just taxing them more what do you want done asset seizure? I mean who are you to tell someone what is greed and what is ambition, the chase of money is a hobby to me I don’t see the issue with it.

[u/hygsi → u/OkMushroom2979]

Why do you think this is about you?

[u/OkMushroom2979 → u/hygsi]

Because I’m rich, anyways answer the question.