Could it be that Chicago school thinking has worked but greed & profiteering elsewhere have stolen benefits from the citizens?
Milton Friedman when asked about combating greed.
The human emotion that drives free market capitalism optimally isn't greed, it's competition.
People compete to produce better goods at a lower price to win acclaim and profit.
Greedy people mess that all up by amassing wealth and then using that wealth to change the rules of the game so that they can amass more wealth.
It's like you're arguing that overeating isn't how you gain weight, it's just having an unbalanced caloric ratio.
And your food analogy works against you. If we extend your analogy, profit is like eating, greed is like overeating. Saying profit = greed is like saying every person who eats three meals a day is a glutton. Competition rewards healthy eating -- efficiency, balance, discipline. Greed is scarfing down the pantry and locking the fridge so nobody else can eat.
The desire to compete is somehow not really the same as the desire to win. This is overtly apparent in things like body building. 99.9% of body builders will never compete in a body building show, let alone win, but enjoy the journey that's mostly full of years of self inflicted pain, occasional injury, and endless dedication - largely for the sake of competition and of course what it does to your body. And that latter part isn't really about showing off or sex or whatever, but simply about pride in what you've accomplished - much in the same way one might take pride in their ability to play chess well, or manage a healthy business.
You're making up your own novel definition of greed there, which is certainly cheating when you're saying Milton Friedman is wrong. He was using greed in a more generally accepted sense, ie, a desire for more than one has right now.
There are a lot of greedy people out there who are scrupulously honest. As far as I can tell, the average greedy person should be modelling scrupulous honesty, advocating fair systems and enforcing rule-following behaviours - that is creating the best environment for acquiring capital and maintaining property rights. Greedy people who white-ant the systems sustaining their capital are generally more stupid than greedy.
No, sorry, it's not only the same emotion, it's the same system and the same rules: if greed is good, why shouldn't one seek network effects, platform effects, last-mile dynamics, vertical and horizontal integration that block competition, engage in FUD and dumping and regulatory capture and so on and so on? The answer that the entire business community and an increasing fraction of the general population seems to agree to is that one should, and this has prevented the sort of gardening that can keep the system actually competitive and working for the people, rather than working for the people on top, which is what it overwhelmingly wants to do when left to its own devices.
If you want a dictionary definition, search suggests "An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth".
On their own neither of those implies any desire to rig games or to avoid competition. Some greedy people do that, but since pretty much everyone is greedy to some extent you find greedy people with every combination of human characteristics.
Greed and competitiveness are two different motivators, and free market capitalism is driven by competition and not greed.
People compete for many reasons and the collection of material wealth is only one of them.
> Greed: a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed
This definition is quite easy to distinguish ordinary desire from greed. Otherwise you need to render selfish and excessive banal and meaningless as well.
They did not need doctors, daycare, helmets, cars (they sat 5+ to a motorcycle), air conditioning, avocados, bedrooms, computers, etc.
Context and our norms is what determines it.
One of my cousins' parents immigrated to the Bay Area, but mine went to the midwest. Am I greedy for desiring to earn income more than a couple standard deviations above the mean so that I could buy land in the Bay Area? Is my cousin not greedy because they were born there?
>Context and our norms is what determines it.
Exactly, which is the problem with trying to distinguish "desire" and "greed". "We" don't have norms. I was lambasted growing up by my grandparents for wanting things that any 1990s kid had in the US, but they didn't have in their poorer country from 1920 to 1940.
It isn't my definition, it's Merriam-Webster dictionary, and I suggest reading the definition more carefully, it really isn't that hard to understand. That is how the word is used.
All of your examples are not selfish or excessive. So not greedy. That it isn't a clear bright line isn't a problem, most judgements in life are not clear cut.
If it just weren’t for that darn greed and profiteering that the Chicago school endorses.
- Communism is awesome!
- What about countries X, Y, and Z?
- Oh, that wasn't "real" communism!
At what point do you decide that's an inevitable outcome, rather than an unfortunate unexpected outcome that happens every single time?
You never want all power to be in the hands of a single group of people, capitalist democracies separates private from public, so politicians regulating companies are not the same people who are owning those companies. Communism can never work since its an autocratic system with a single player, you need multiple actors.
And yes, in some capitalist democracies company leaders are close bedfellows with politicians, we call that corruption, it isn't like that in all countries.
Impossible. Communism has no concept of state (nor money, nor class). That's, like, its defining feature.
Of course, you can't just wish for class, state, and money to go away. They are necessary features of our current world. Communism is the imagined outcome of what happens after we achieve post-scarcity. It is a work of science fiction. Star Trek is a more modern adaptation on the same idea.
> Communism can never work since its an autocratic system
If it were more than science fiction, it is literally the opposite, but, again, depends on post-scarcity. You are likely confusing communism with the Communist Party, who believe in an autocratic system being necessary to pave the way to achieving post-scarcity, with, on paper, a desire to get there.
While the Communist Party does believe in socialism, that does not sum it up either. That would be like trying to tie the Republican Party up in a capitalism bow. They do believe in capitalism, but so does the Democratic Party. Yet they are clearly different parties with some very different ideas.
> or any existing embodiment of the first stages of Communism.
The USA is the country most in the first stages of communism. Its technical innovation has nearly pushed food into post-scarcity territory (some argue it is already there), and it is working hard, harder than any other country, to do the same in other areas of production.
While some of your points resonate with what Trump is doing, for the most part he is an aberration and there isn't yet much indication that he — or anyone in the future — will get away with it.
Ironically, it did become a dictatorship after the USA staged a military coup and overthrew said government, but anyway...
Communism doesn't exactly promise anything. It is a sci-fi imagining of what the world will look like in a post-scarcity world. Star Trek is a more modern adaptation on the same idea. Would you say Star Trek promises us something? Notably what communism does imagine, though, is that there is no state.
If you read back in the comments, you'll see we're not talking talking about communism at all, rather "communist state". As before, communism rejects the concept of having a state, so you know we cannot possibly be talking about communism. Instead, "communist state" usually refers to a country under rule by the Communist Party. As Chile was ruled by a Marxist inside a Communist Party coalition we said that was likely close enough for what the earlier commenter was trying to convey.
Chile was a technocratic democracy then. Is that paradise? That is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, but it must have been pretty good else why would the USA have wanted it to dismantle it so badly, undoing what was, at the time, one of the most stable democracies around?
Most imagine post-scarcity will be awesome. While one can never know for sure, for all intents and purposes, the first point is also true. To the best of our knowledge, achieving post-scarcity will be awesome. It is why everyone, even (and in particular!) the USA, is striving to get there someday.
Communism imagines that statehood will come to end, so "countries", in the context of communism, doesn't make sense. It is likely confusing "communism" with "Communist Party".