Profit Motive and Greed

I continue to enjoy my subscription to the Wall Street Journal, but am certainly well aware of the biases in the articles.  Today I read about the positive impact of deregulation.  The focus was on the fact that deregulation can lead to improved efficiencies and cost savings, so that the money can be spent on increased wages, benefits, etc.  While I theoretically agree, it would have been nice to have the balance of acknowledging that the savings might go towards profit.  There's the rub.  Capitalism is about the profit motive.  That can certainly lead to innovation.  It should lead to better wages in order to hire the best people.  Todays low unemployment rates are certainly finally having some positive impact, but one has to wonder why it's taken this long.

The challenge is when the profit motive and greed intersect.  If a business can get away with not increasing wages or benefits in order to extract a greater profit, they very well may do so. While from a long term business perspective, this may not make sense, I often talk about the push to maximize quarterly earnings in todays business world.  People, including business owners, often can't look beyond today.  Take the money now, worry about everything else later.  I've written before about the fundamental problem of greed when it comes to human beings.

Greed is an obvious downside to capitalism, but socialism isn't immune from human greed.  The difference is that under a more socialistic economic system, greed results in apathy and laziness, or it results in attempts to achieve power.  Our human foibles will always be the downfall of any system, and thus government ultimately has to step in to modulate our human failures.

I just wish that the Wall Street Journal might recognize the balance in their articles.  Instead, I just have to keep it in mind.  That's ok, I'm quite capable of doing that.