When Greed is Good

“Nothing is more to the self-interest of the average person than to live in a society that is filled with multi-billionaire capitalists and their corporations, all busy using their vast wealth to produce the products he buys and to compete for the labor he sells.”

– How the 1 Percent Provides the Standard of Living of the 99 Percent

In 2011, Occupy Wall Street, an anti-capitalist movement, coined the inane phrase, “We are the 99 percent”, a political slogan noting the divide between the top 1 percent and the rest.  Their solution to the dilemma?  Seize money from the rich and distribute it among themselves.  The problem is, if you remove the capital from the producer, you lose the producer. 

One aspect of the protesters' disdain is the growing pay gap between the haves and the have-nots.  As such, they seemingly expect that an entry-level employee and the company’s CEO will be paid the same.  But the president of a multi-million dollar enterprise has to know a lot more than their unskilled labor.  Thus, the hundred million dollar pay package for the Walmart chief executive versus a near minimum wage for the front door greeter reflects not only the skill required, the education needed, the complexity of the job, and going market rates for each, but the massive differences in responsibility. 

This example reflects a “zero-sum game” mentality that says that when one person wins, another must lose.  That when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.  This ignores the value creation that comes from the products and services that entrepreneurs produce for society's benefit.  The greatest value comes not just from the products we value, but from the labor required to produce them.  These are the jobs that the overwhelming number of people in society rely on to support their families and lifestyles. 

Influenced by the Marxist theory of class struggle, these modern protesters also advocated for a socially owned economy where goods are distributed on a need’s basis, misunderstanding that production must precede consumption.  Many would further call for the abolition of private property to attain their ideal of equality of poverty for all.

Most of today’s 1 percenters work as either executives, financial professionals, or entrepreneurs.  In the United States in 2025, these top 1 percenters represented 32% of the nation’s wealth, with their wealth primarily in the form of production.  Profits derived from the production of their products and services are only achieved when they meet the wants and needs of the consuming public.  To maintain profits, companies must continuously produce new and improved products or create new and improved efficiency in their production. 

As an example, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, may be known mostly for his Tesla electric vehicle company and SpaceX, his aeronautics company, but it is his Starlink service that is particularly beneficial to society at large.  Providing near-global internet access, particularly in remote areas, is available at a small price to any person with a dish and a router.  This satellite service is also unaffected by local outages, something its competitors cannot avoid. 

In George Reisman’s 2015 pamphlet, “How the 1 Percent Provides the Standard of Living of the 99 Percent”, Reisman, an economics professor, praises the 1 percent for their contributions to raising the standard of living for millions of Americans and citizens around the world.  For it is they who create the products and services we consume, while also providing the jobs that allow us to live independently. 

Innovation is the number one contributor to high profits for producers who create new products and services that make people’s lives easier and better.  Profits, however, are short-lived as the market floods with competition, not only with new and better products, but also with more options at lower prices.  Making the beneficiaries of the 1 percent the consuming public. 

This presumes, of course, that their contributions do not include government subsidies, profits earned from protective tariffs, or other government interventions on their behalf, the very opposite of capitalism.  For it is the government itself that creates inflation, driving prices higher.  And it is the government that makes production harder and more expensive with excessive rules and regulations.  And it is the government alone that taxes, borrows money, overspends, and creates budget deficits, which remove capital from the marketplace, leading to less production and less economic growth overall. 

Recent upswings in wealth concentration are also the result of low interest rates and monetary expansion by the federal government.  This maldistribution of income is caused by the inflation created by central banks’ monetary policy, mostly due to the rich receiving the newly created money first, while prices are still low, while the working and middle classes receive the expanded money only after prices increase.  Making the 99 percenters’ chief culprit the government, not the entrepreneurs and their companies. 

Wall Street maverick Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 movie Wall Street, said, “Greed is Good”!  Not only greed for money, but greed for life, love, and knowledge.  Allowing people to keep the fruits of their labor by following their desires and ambitions leads to innovation, economic growth, and ultimately progress in society.  Wealth creation leads not only to personal success and power for the titans of industry but also to less poverty, sickness, and death for the rest.

For these reasons and more, we need more millionaires and billionaires, not fewer.