Greed is pretty much inherent to capitalistic systems, which reward greed and treat it as a virtue (along with profiteering and selfishness).
While it's OK to decry greed, it isn't OK to build an economic system based on the idea that people aren't greedy. They are. There are billions of year of history behind the greed of humanity, and I'm not exaggerating. If you build an economic system based on something that is, fundamentally, not human, you will get bad results.
That's where other systems tend to fall down, and why for all the "failures" of capitalism, the worst off in a modern capitalistic society is better than all but the best off in almost any other society.
I'm willing to listen to other economic systems that also acknowledge greed. I recommend the book "Accelerando" for a half-decent exploration of the question of whether there is something better once you have pervasive computerization. But the solution to the problem of greed isn't trying to build a system based on the belief that there is some way to make people not greedy.
Greed is not capitalism's fault. Greed is, ultimately, traceable back to the fact that for every live form that survive to reproduce, there are thousands that don't. Greed may look odd in the incredibly, utterly strange place we currently find ourselves in where we have more resources than we know what to do with, but this is the strangeness, not greed.
I'm pretty skeptical of every other system I've ever seen, including socialism and communism, because they are basically built on the idea that we'll take control away from the greedy, shortsighted people and give it to the enlightened, ungreedy ones who will run things better. There is of course the (perfectly correct) argument that the information flow of such a system can't be made to work with the tools we have, but there is also the even-more-fundamental problem that the "enlightened, ungreedy" class of people doesn't exist. There are only people claiming to be the enlightened, ungreedy class. Until you can build a non-capitalist system that isn't based on this fundamental failure, it's not going to do well.
(That said, I'm only a little-l libertarian and I acknowledge that the government does have a place. I'm talking economic system here, not whole society system. Just as capitalism harnesses greed, instead of denying it, a government should harness capitalism, instead of denying it.)
When an electrical engineer designs a circuit he accounts, as best he can, for the behavior of electrons. He would never design something that assumed electrons would behave in an unrealistic way.
To me, individual greed in people is as intrinsic and predictable as a negative charge on an electron. Capitalism is designed w/ an honest look at the way humans actually behave rather than the way we wished they behaved.
In theory, democracy should exploit the same effects as unregulated or lightly-regulated capitalism: politicians act in their self-interest (pursuing power, prestige, etc.) but in order to do so must provide tangible benefits to voters in order to keep getting elected.
In reality, of course, politicians run all sorts of schemes on the side to their own personal benefit, but to the detriment of the larger body of voters. In much the same way, executives run all sorts of schemes on the side to their own personal benefit, but to the detriment of the larger body of shareholders in their company (the analogue of the voters).
Yet in the politician's case this is heralded as a failure of government, and little additional discussion takes place (since the presumption before the fact was that government must always fail); in the executive's case all manner of arguments are advanced to try to explain that it is not a failure of capitalism (since the presumption before the fact was that capitalism must never fail).
In a very real sense, then, this turns into the fallacy of begging the question: capitalism does not fail because it is postulated that capitalism does not fail, and government fails because it is postulated that government fails.
Big government is slow to react to feedback. It is sluggish, it is structurally not generally rewarded for reacting to feedback (itself a critical form of feedback), and in the case of something like the US, the government has damn near been able to legislate the negative feedback away because it was so unbelievably large and powerful. Consequently, it is low on competence. (On the flip side, a democracy works better than most systems because it has more feedback than most other governing systems.)
Most importantly of all, the "death penalty" is hard to apply to a government, which really bounds the degree of negative feedback it can receive.
A large company can look like that, too, except that the corporate death penalty (total liquidating bankruptcy) actually still can be applied, bounding the ability of the company to fail. (Barring government intervention.) On the other hand, it is possible to run even a very large company in such a way that it is always reacting to feedback and staying on top of things. It's a delicate operation, but it can be done.
Additionally, from the consumer side, as long as no monopoly has formed, you can choose a new company with very low friction, providing further feedback to the companies in question. Choosing a new government ranges from "very hard" to "impossible", especially on an instantaneous basis.
I think there are fundamental differences between government and even very large businesses, because as I like to say, a large enough quantitative change is a qualitative change. But it is true that it is all on a continuum and large enough companies can be in a failure state for a long time before it all catches up to them.
But yes, absolutely, companies can be abusive failures too. One of the critical platforms of my "little-l" libertarianism is that monopoly-busting is a valid act of government, and the primary reason is that having a monopoly is one of the easiest ways for a company to break the feedback loop, by preventing its customers from being able to offer negative feedback to the company by leaving. Since this equally applies to the federal government, I'm a proponent for "State's Rights" and spinning as much power as possible to as small a jurisdiction as possible, because they can react to feedback more quickly, where the largest organization in the world (the Federal Government) just can't.
I've left feedback ill-defined, as I've never completely worked it out yet, but one thing I'd point out is that I don't mean walking up and telling someone they are doing a bad job, I mean like "taking your business elsewhere" or "suing them", that is, actual consequences of import, not just words.
(Also, in my first paragraph, I highlight the word "competent". I did not say "good"; a well-run capitalist company or well-run government can competently execute very evil or bad things if organized properly. Stopping that is an entirely different topic.)
(One of many valid ways of looking at our current financial problems is the way the Fed has continuously chosen to not react to the feedback that our entitlement programs are not sustainable. The reason we are all sitting here looking depressed is that we all know for a fact that it will continue to push back dealing with the negative feedback of the entitlement programs, and indeed, as wonderful as full health care or capping our pollution may be, it's only whistling into the dark about the real source of the negative feedback (in a nutshell appropriate to this post, too much spending) and actually reacting in the wrong direction. We all know it will continue to put off dealing with the inevitable for as long as possible, and we may yet discover that this form of government just isn't feasible because it's too easy for it to just keep deferring negative feedback until it's no longer possible to survive it all. Only the Federal Government, with its capability to literally print money, has even the theoretical potential to get in this deep. Even state governments the size of medium-sized countries have to deal with the negative feedback head-on; for all the trouble California is having, it is at least having to deal with the issues whether it likes it or not. Our Federal government, since it doesn't like it, isn't, and for creating this feedback-immune monstrosity, we shall all pay. And once you start looking at it like this, you see just how many of the solutions being proposed address the root problem: 0.
Another angle is to notice that all these commitments that are killing us are all expressed in feedback-proof form; WE WILL spend X.Y Billion on Z. We do not stop to ask if we even have X.Y Billion, or if conditions have changed, or if the desirability of Z has changed, or the feasibility of Z has changed. WE WILL provide XYZ health coverage when you retire in 25 years, regardless of the contents of the intervening 25 years. If you can see why you could never build a concurrent program on a primitive like that, you can begin to see why there's no chance in hell to build a sane government spending program on such a primitive either. It's all "bang-and-pray" control.)
Therefore in a properly configured Capitalist system, the "greedier" people are, the better off society is as a whole. I am fully aware that the Western economies are not correctly configured - but they're the least-worst in the world by any reasonable measure (such as, percentage of the population that starved this year).
For me, with this basic distinction, everything fell into place. Also it assumes that it is not necessarily people who are prone to be greedy, but that the community rules makes them behave in specific patterns that hardly come as a surprise, once you see the benefit structure.
Also it assumes that it is not necessarily people who are prone to be greedy, but that the community rules makes them behave in specific patterns that hardly come as a surprise, once you see the benefit structure.
Motives which are at work are rather: hunger, thirst, curiosity, love, desire for attention, pain, fear. Probably others. Simple ones, but not that simple as just greed.
In my experience there is no limit to how strongly small children put their wants and desires first. Therefore they are, by definition, "greedy". There is no malice in this. There is no awareness of consequences for others. But any adult who acted in the same way would be considered incredibly greedy.
There are the kids which cling to this one toy car which is suddenly in very high regard among two friends, but there are also those which give it willingly away, once the other child starts crying or only looking very sadly. Compassion over greed. I see that quite often.
So I don't think one can say that in the infant (as a "pure" human, which has not been moderated by social norms) you can see that "humans are greedy." And even less so that holds for adults.
Other systems treat greed as much as a virtue or more, but provide much more harmful ways to satisfy such greed.