Greed: You're doing it wrong.

Julian Sanchez points out another example of heads-I'm-right-tails-you're-wrong economics:

The Root of All Evil

I’m bemused at the way we’re perpetually told the fundamental cause of the ongoing meltdown is Wall Street “greed,” as though that somehow counted as an explanation. How, pray, would we describe it if mortgage lenders had rejected many more applications from lower-income folks, on the grounds that they were poor risks? Well, greed, of course.

Some people are going to be critical of banks and businessmen no matter the circumstances. I'd venture that this has been true since, oh, Cosimo de' Medici, and will continue to be true at least as long as Naomi Klein's DNA does laps in the gene pool.

Sanchez continues:

Pretty much whatever they did, they’d be doing because they expected it to maximize their profit; the issue is their judgement, not their motives. Or put another way: The problem isn’t that people were greedy, it’s that they weren’t very good at being greedy.

Amen.