Is Greed Fair?

In the 1987 movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko famously stated, “Greed is good.” This quote is brought up on a regular basis to explain what is wrong with America. This movie put into words the political left’s disgust for the profit motive in the United States.

Success is the basis for the political speak of today, where the Left continues to argue for what is “fair.” President Obama regularly speaks of the need for the wealthy to “pay their fair share.” The law known as Obama Care is, at this very moment, moving to ruin the most effective medical system in existence. Despite the current system's success, Obama Care was designed to make things fairer.
Who is in charge of deciding what is fair? If all the kids in the neighborhood decided little Jimmy should not own the only bat and ball and take it away from him to share equally, is that fair? If a shopper buys a steak for her family, but another family can only afford pasta, is it fair to cut up the steak purchased by the first family and send half to the second family?

Once fair is decided by the group, how many more bats and balls will Jimmy’s parents buy him? If food is taken away from one family and given to another, how many more steaks will that first family buy?

Progressives want us to be equal. We’ve seen equal in action in the Soviet Union, North Korea and Cuba. Fairness does not equal success, fairness equals misery.
Despite the angst it causes Liberals, the world is not fair. There will always be winners and losers. The only difference is whether the winners are chosen by the market place or by the government. You can always walk away from a marketplace; the government does not give you that choice.

The left would like us to believe that fair is what makes a great civilization. They are wrong. Hard work, generosity, selflessness, charity and caring make a great civilization. Trying to make everything fair makes for a repressive, hostile civilization ruled by elites.

America was founded on the idea of business. Henry Ford did not develop assembly line manufacturing to be fair, he wanted to be successful. He wanted a profit. Along the way he provided jobs, created millionaires and moved the U.S. to become the leading manufacturing power in the world. You can call his success greed, but you would be wrong. The automobile industry was enabling for millions who made their lives working in the industry.

The pharmaceutical industry has made many people rich. The industry has also allowed people to live longer, be more productive, avoid painful illnesses and recover from diseases that only a few years ago would have been fatal. We now hear drug companies are greedy. Let’s hope that in the name of fairness, we don’t remove the profit motive from people starting companies to cure illnesses. We should wake up each morning praying that some greedy so-and-so starts a new company with the idea of curing diseases. The person who comes up with the cure for cancer will positively affect millions of lives.

Who decides how much the person who rids the world of cancer should earn?
According to Bloomberg our labor participation rate is down to 63.5%, a 31-year low. Our economy is growing at a 1.8% rate. For over four years we have tried fairness as the test. Fairness is a failure. Success will involve a return to business, low taxes and personal responsibility. Rewarding successful behavior will turn around the economy. Those who have suffered the most from the idea of fairness have been the very people Liberals suggest they want to help. Those suffering the most are the poor.

Wall Street was a movie about fictional people. The real people who made the movie are very wealthy. The people who made the movie have a point of view they wanted to sell. Bottom line, rich people getting richer, was selling the idea that working people should relax and let the film producers make the money while we watched a movie. It’s just not fair.