When I said greed is good and that greed without bad consequences is the problem I meant that greed is a healthy and even a required impulse to drive progress, innovation and ultimately growth in the marketplace which benefits all of it's participants and that the cause of problems that arise in the marketplace when it's trying to progress, innovate and grow is the artificially removed risks of a loss.
As long as you have greed coupled with the risk of loss those two forces balance each other out and are healthy and required if your goal is to have the marketplace grow productively.
Oh and I agree there is no objective good or bad outside of trying to reach a specific objective goal.
I think I understand what you mean by "greed is good" and I agree to the extent that greed can greatly motivate people and doing selfish things can include be altruistic.
Now I have another problem: the growth paradigm.
To get back on topic, listen to what Bauwen says in the discussed video:
Imagine you're a martian and you come to this planet and you see this race of humans actually destroying the biosphere. And the reason they do this is because the believe the system is based on the idea that we have infinite material resources. And this is just not true. So becauase of compound interest and other features which mean we have to grow all the time and this creates this compound exponential growth. And the planet can no longer carry it, so this is the real crisis of our system.
you say "growth in the marketplace which benefits all of it's participants". I'm not so sure. What kind of growth is it? Does
any growth create benefit?
Here's an example: I talked to a friend last night, he works in engineering and these guys are currently investing thousands of EUR into chaning a certain part of some machinery they sell, a part that is screwed onto some other part of the machine. What's the change? Well, they change it so that
it breaks when you screw it off for maintenance so that the customer has to buy that part again.
That's driven by greed. Does it imply growth? Hell yea: more money is moved, more parts sold, GDP increases. Does it benefit all participants (or even just: is the sum of all participants' benefits positive): hell no! More natural resources are used, more work is expended, the uptime of the product is reduced and the maintenance cost increased.
So here we have a case of "growth" not being beneficial for the whole of society. War is another such case.
So no, greed is not necessarily good.
