Greed & Hippies Properly Understood

Posted by Erick Erickson
Wednesday, October 12th at 4:46AM EDT

About the only thing these hippies, hipsters, senior citizens who never grew up, and college trust funders out protesting can agree on is that greed is bad. They want the whole capitalist system pulled up by the root and replaced with something else because of greed.

What they either do not understand or choose to ignore is that greed is not a capitalist invention. Greed exists because people do. Greed exists in capitalist societies, socialist societies, and communist societies.

All men are created equal and all men are born into this world as sinners. One of those sins is greed.

The few people who claim to be without greed are typically greedy for the praise of others or full of pride at not being greedy. Pride is a far worse sin than greed because pride is the root of most every sin.

But of all the varieties of greed out there, what the hippies do not seem to understand is that greed in a capitalist society is far less pernicious than the greed in the systems they advocate, be it socialist or communist.

Greed in a capitalist system takes the form of money — lust for it, the acquisition of it, and the hoarding of it.

Greed in socialist and communist systems takes the form of power. Just as a CEO has a house in the Hamptons while his workers make vastly less than he does, the Politburo member has a dacha on the Black Sea while his constituents wait in a bread line half starved.

In a capitalist system, one can take a risk, dare to compete with the greedy 1%’er, and quite possibly become one of those 1%’ers. And when unable to do it alone, a group of people can pool their money together and compete with the rich.

In the communist system these kids are advocating, the powerless cannot compete with the powerful. And it is hard to pool power together to compete against power, because while a CEO might be able to pull off a hostile take over of your company, the greedy communist can kill you with his power. One can escape a CEO of one company for the CEO of another company or become their own CEO. One must go under barbed wire and dodge bullets to escape their communist masters.

What these dirty urban hipsters want is a form of greed themselves. They don’t want the rich capitalist to have his money. The hipsters covet power. They are greedy in their own way for their own power. They want the power to set the salaries of the CEO and determine, based on their own sense of fair play, what is and is not fair and what is and is not just.

What the hipsters want is far more dangerous than what the top 1% in this country have — the hipsters want the power to control all our lives through force of government. The capitalists just want to sell us things.

There are very few, if any, capitalist systems that tend toward totalitarianism because of competition and the ability of money to flow to others as monopoly enterprises become inefficient and collapse. Socialist and communist systems tend to become totalitarian over time because power, unlike money, is much more easily hoarded.

In a capitalist system there is greed. But that greed necessitates the capitalist produce a good or service the rest of us want. And we can always say no. There is no saying no to the communists.

And the hipsters want us to be unable to say no to them.

Communists, socialists, and capitalists all have poor people in their systems. But the odds are greater that more people are poorer and hungrier the further removed from capitalism they go. And in all, there is greed.