A society based on greed is not society at all, but a war of the strong against the weak

[swag]

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/oct/16/bleak-house/

Bleak House
Charles Simic

. . .

Even for people with impressive past work experience and a range of skills, finding a job that pays a wage one can live on and that comes with healthcare benefits has become extremely difficult. It’s especially hard for young people. It’s been years since I’ve heard of any of my graduate students getting a decent job. Working as a waiter or a waitress in a trendy restaurant where tips are good is often the best they can hope for. For many others, it’s much worse, of course. Fifty years after Lyndon Johnson declared a “War on Poverty,” the richest country in the world no longer cares if millions of its less fortunate citizens live or die.

If one needs proof, one can start with what happened to food stamps in Congress, the so-called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that goes to 47 million Americans every month, almost half of them children and teenagers. Some of those benefits, approved in 2009, will be terminated on October 31. With fuel prices expected to increase this winter, this means, for many families in cold states, choosing between staying warm and having enough to eat. According to The Boston Globe, former US senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire said that the stimulus was never intended to be a permanent source of money. “All stimulus funding was to be temporary,” said Gregg, an immensely wealthy man and now the chief executive of a banking industry group. John Cochrane, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, also opposed the stimulus, arguing that it advanced the false assumption that “completely wasted federal spending helps the economy.” Worries about people who need help are a legitimate concern, he said, but food stamps discourage people from finding better jobs because recipients are worried they’ll lose the benefit. “At some point,” he said, “you have to be a little bit heartless.”

Of course you do. Just consider the effort of the Republicans in the House to overrule the Affordable Care Act, a legislation ratified by the majority of elected representative of the people and signed into law by the president. Bettering the lives of anyone but the wealthy, as we know, has ceased to be a concern of the Republican Party. But millions of Americans are on the brink of buying affordable health insurance and freeing themselves from a worry that makes their lives utter misery; the concerted effort backed by some of the richest men in this country to deprive them of that chance may be without precedent for sheer malice. Indifference to the plight and suffering of human beings of one class or another by some segment of the population is a universal phenomenon, but spending millions of dollars to deepen the misery of one’s fellow citizens and enlisting members of one political party to help you do so is downright vile. It must be motivated as much by sadism as by the political calculation that if these uninsured were to get insurance, they would give the Democratic Party a governing majority simply out of gratitude for letting them see a doctor.

Organized, by what The New York Times calls “a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III,” the backers of the government shut-down are ensconced in organizations like Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Works, Club for Growth, Generation Opportunity, and Young Americans for Liberty, their names as fake as those of Communist front organizations in the 1930s and 1940s and as venal as their forerunners. These groups spent more than $200 million last year to spread disinformation and delude the gullible among the populace about the supposedly catastrophic harm giving health care to the uninsured would do to the economy. Using them as a model, Americans should look out only for themselves. We have forgotten what this country once understood, that a society based on nothing but selfishness and greed is not a society at all, but a state of war of the strong against the weak.

[indepat]

1. The war of the strong against the weak picked up in full steam and earnest under Saint Reagan's

reign and has continued relentlessly ever since albeit slowed a teensey-weensy bit under wjc and bho.

[Mnemosyne]

2. K&R nt

[Miranda4peace]

3. Fortunately in a Democracy things can change in a relatively short period of time

And my guess is, even in conservative states, ebt will be strengthened when they realize just how ANGRY people become when they are hungry.

[Blue_Tires]

4. k+r

[DirkGently]

5. Absolutely. Civilization is not a zero-sum contest for resources.

American conservatives think it is. They refuse to acknowledge the cooperative structure that permits them to live, and therefore have no problem sawing away at the supports that hold us all.

Great piece.

[Igel]

6. And yet he probably undermines his premise in many ways.

He'll try to recruit the best students. Graduate programs are "greedy" for quality. In fact, graduate students are "greedy" for good jobs and struggle mightily to write dissertations that get them good jobs, and articles that get them some degree of notoriety.

He'll try to get grants or perks. Faculty are "greedy" when it comes to wanting money. They may wish that all faculty members everywhere got all the money, space, and resources they want, but they know it isn't going to happen. And they want to be first in line.

Some kids are greedy for good grades. Certainly not a finite resource. Still, while it's in the professor's power to grant complete satisfaction, I'm willing to bet that he doesn't say on day 1 of his lecture courses that "Every student will receive as high a grade as can be given." Without meaning, "as can be given provided you do all the work and learn the material at a high enough level." In other words, he probably will fail students and hand out a variety of Cs. (Or, since he probably also has grad classes, grades of B-, the "grad student's F".)

Many kids are "greedy" for prestige university names on their degrees. It sinks them in the end when they're not up to the standards at those schools, it allows the universities to charge more for tuition, etc.

Greed comes in many forms, not just in terms of that common metric of evaluating all things, currency. Some people approve of some forms of greed while disapproving of forms that don't affect them. They carefully define "greed" in ways that let them claim they do not fit the definition--and insist that theirs is the one true definition. Whatever the usage-based evidence says.


My wife was a prof with grad students. Churning out research published in peer review journals, asked for invited talks, etc., etc. But her students also didn't get jobs. She pondered the worth to society of producing PhDs that reliably failed to gain work in their field and decided her economic activity was injurious. So she considered whether it was the quality of the students, the quality of the mentorship and instruction, or other factors. The numbers weighed against what she was doing: In any year there were 10x as many grads as job openings. The kind of research she and her colleagues were doing and supervising wasn't getting her kids the jobs. She finally decided that she'd take a $35k/year pay cut to teach high school than continue to line her own pockets while producing PhDs that couldn't get jobs.While she's a Republican in every election that she's voted in for the last 10 years, she decided that greed wasn't good: The greed of drawing a decent salary that lets you do what you like while producing PhD students who work as waiters and waitresses wasn't for her. She valued a positive contribution to society coupled with a reduced negative contribution to society as more important than $.

Civilization is not necessarily a zero-sum game for resources. However, in some instances it very much is--or degenerates into a ponzi scheme. This, however, is a completely different issue from greed.