Greed isn’t good

Given that Oliver Stone’s Wall Street was intended as a biting critique of corporate greed, overreaching and unethical conduct, I wonder if it annoyed Stone that so many free-market worshippers appropriated its best-known line for their own uses?
For those who don’t know, Wall Street has Charlie Sheen become protege to Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), a ruthless businessman of much avarice and little principles who at one point tells his audience that “Greed is good”—because it drives men like him to achieve, build companies, and put new products before an audience (or so I remember—it’s been a while).
Given that Sheen ultimately turns against Gekko after discovering he’s destroying the company Sheen’s father works for (and ripping off the pension plan, IIRC), I don’t think we’re supposed to take Gekko’s speech as Stone’s view. But in the years since the movie came out (1987), I’ve seen multiple right wingers make the same Ayn Rand-esque argument: Yes, greed is good! An unregulated free market liberates capitalists and titans of industry to achieve great wealth by providing the greatest good for the greatest numbers. Everyone wins!
As the 23 years since the film have shown, this is balderdash. Greed guts pay for hourly workers so that CEOs can retire from floundering companies with golden parachutes (it’s not their fault the company floundered—they did the best they could in hard times—but it’s always their achievement when the company succeeds). Greed was loan officers at one bank approving mortgages and loans they knew the customer couldn’t repay because that kept the bosses happy and secured their bonuses (seriously, I’ve read an account of one exec who balled a front-line worker out for actually trying to verify a customer’s income). Greed is a pack of incompetent financiers who tank the economy, then continue fighting for their multimillion dollar bonuses.
Don’t get me wrong, the desire for wealth is not a bad thing. Even for more wealth than you need. But greed is a bad thing: When you desire wealth so much you’re willing to screw people over for it—destroy lives, wreck companies, just so you can have more—it’s a destructive force. Which is why avarice (which I think sounds much worse) is one of the seven deadly sins. It no more means a decent desire for wealth than gluttony means merely a healthy appetite (on the other hand, pride and lust can both be positive or negative, so I can’t claim any general rule about the Seven Deadlies here).
By insisting that all greed is good, that desire for wealth always produces positive results, that in the free market greed is a positive factor, free-market conservatives fool themselves. And contributed to the disastrous FUBAR of the current economy. Assuming that the financial industry couldn’t possibly enrich itself at the expense of everyone else was naive (and politically correct).
And equally unfortunately, they’re still insisting the same things: If we just get rid of all those remaining regulations on poor, oppressed corporate America, we’ll create a garden of Eden and a rising tide that will list everybody’s boats.
And we’ll all get a pony too.

P.S. John Rogers, the show runner of Leverage, offers some thoughts on corporate corruption here.