Some time ago, I wrote a couple posts about greed (which you can find a link to at the end of this post).  "What if supporters of personal accounts are greedy?" I asked in the first post.  I then offered in the second post some descriptions of greed from times of wealth in the last century, but there was never an explanation as to why it is that personal account supporters are not greedy.  So after a long delay, this is the much anticipated finale to the series on greed.

First of all, it should be pointed out that the realization that personal accounts supporters are not greedy did not come in a logical form.  As noted in the first post, Sam Harris writes about problems with knowledge, specifically our ability to know what we know.  More relevant to this discussion, though, is the research that suggests we often know things before we become conscious of them.  

I was watching some clips from the African wild recently on television, and there was an impala being stalked by a leopard.  As the leopard crept closer, the impala tensed up and became still.  The impala knew that something was wrong, but it remained frozen in place.  Why didn't it run away?

People are the same way.  We often receive information that we cannot immediately process, and we come to have feelings about something that we can't quite explain.  "I just knew" event x was going to happen, people will say.  But quite often they didn't just know, but rather they were in the early stages of processing information.

Even after the fact, though, it remains difficult to explain how one came to make a conclusion.  We've all been in the position where we're the last one in on a joke.  But what was it that made us suspicious?  It is often hard to trace that suspicion to one particular factor.  And even if we think we can, that factor in isolation may not have been enough.   

All of this is to say two things: 1) I never actually thought that supporters of personal accounts are greedy.  I did, however, need to process some information in order to understand why.  2) The realization that we are not greedy did not come in the form of a singular fact.  Once I began thinking about the arguments of personal account opponents, lots of pieces of information began flowing in that proved to me we support reform for the right reasons.

Here are some of those pieces:

- We are the people we represent.  We are not the Gordon Geckos of this debate; we are the workers who are being ripped off.

- Might we not call the Social Security program greedy in a certain sense?  The program used to collect just 1% of our paychecks.  Over time, that number has increased to 12.4%. 

- What about Salinger's definition of greed (treasure for treasure's sake)?  Might we not say that non-reformers who want to keep the failing Social Security system alive as it is do so for selfish reasons?  Imagine you're constructing a new skyscraper that will be among the tallest in the world.  But as you get higher and higher, the building begins to lean heavily to one side.  Can you imagine asking for the workers to pile on more bricks because the building isn't ready to fall just yet?  Of course not.  But non-reformers might, and it is vanity that pushes them ahead.  In the case of Social Security, they think that one more tax hike or one more benefit cut will do the trick.  And considering that we're the ones paying for superficial fixes, this type of thinking is not just incorrect, it's greedy. 

- Older folks who call us greedy often misunderstand the way Social Security works.  Some think that we don't want to support the retirement of our elders.  But that isn't the case.  Their benefits will be protected.  We're concerned that future generations will be paying unnecessarily large amount of money into Social Security, and we're trying to change that.  This isn't greedy.  In fact, it is just the opposite.

- Congress spends the Social Security surplus on projects unrelated to retirement.  How can reform that ends the raid on the trust fund be considered greedy?

There is a lot more where these came from, but I think you get the idea.  We are in this for the right reasons, and considering why this is so highlights some of the bad thinking done by our opponents.