If we can build a society that encourages greed and sentiments which justify inequality, then we can also build a society nurturing solidarity, compassion and equality.
In some cases, no doubt, it did, but it also encouraged greed, vanity, a lack of accounting candour and manipulative behaviour.
Reality TV encourages greed, deception and humiliation.
Or did dividend tax cuts encourage corporate greed?
We want an end to a system that rewards and encourages reckless greed, unsustainable growth and endless profits for a few, done on the backs of the many.
McBride said the "dark" world of politics encourages vanity, duplicity, greed, hypocrisy and cruelty, and confessed that he was "sucked in like a concubine at a Roman orgy".
We could do with more good people in the world, and given that so much of modern capitalist society encourages the opposite – greed, consumerism, dog-eat-dog, self-interest – we should welcome any countervailing force.
Greed may also encourage lawyers to change their payment plans.
And there comes another point, where the willingness to tolerate greed, and to live alongside it, and even to encourage it, becomes a sort of madness too.
As Ayn Rand used to say, for them greed and selfishness are good, and charity and kindness just encourage the leeches.
