The Mrs has been to see her new colleagues in the Grim North and has been given her lecture schedule for next term. And on it is a talk called “Greed is Good”. Of course it damn well is.
Greed drives capitalism, it drives free markets. It spurs on progress, advances in medicine and technology. Greed has caused life expectancy to surge and given us all material comforts our forebears could not even have dreamt of. Greed will give us new greener means of transport and will take the human race to other planets. Greed is not only good it is great.
The problems with capitalism occur when the Government butts in either to prop up failing companies or industries or to regulate good companies out of business. Such behaviour encourages recklessness and criminality and stops the invisible hand from allocating resources in the way society needs and deserves and would enjoy if greed was calling all the shots.
As a child of Thatcher who worked on Wall Street in the good old days of the mid-late 1980s, naturally I leave it to the great Gordon Gekko to express this better than I can. Somehow I suspect that this is not quite the message that the Mrs, the woman formerly known as the deluded lefty, will be delivering to the snowflakes after Christmas.