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well, first of all, alansmith, don't start your replies to me with assertions that I don't understand what I'm talking about or I won't respond to you.
you claim I don't understand capitalism, but my post was about capitalists. To the extent I'm characterizing their argument, it would be their failure to understand what capitalism does or does not do--not mine.
then you launch into some kind of discussion that doesn't even significantly alter what I said. Regardless, the only defining characteristic of capitalism is the personal ownership of assets. Nothing in your post points to this, so at the very least you should temper the irony in your responses. Everything in your reply are assumptions you've loaded into the model as to what capitalism does or ought to do. Your comments aren't the defining characteristics of capitalism. At best, they characterize the US flavor of capitalism, but by no means does it have to be such and wasn't before and certainly won't always be.
As to how one can wonder if something is nurture or not, your comments on greed are not even historically accurate in our american historical context. furthermore, if you were correct, and greed were innate, we wouldn't have lasted very long as a species since particular people would have been driven to conduct themselves in ways that didn't serve their best interests. greed is the desire to accumulate more than one needs. greed would compel people to accumulate beyond their means, not just maxamize their utility. Lots of people maximized ther utility long before capitalism was even a concept to be debated over. our nation's wealth was founded on the opposite of greed. Read the Protestant Ethic by Max Weber for more insight on that. You might really enjoy his work. He's not critical of capitalism except to argue it ought to be fair.
regardless, no behaviorist would or could claim greed is innate. Perhaps some kind of behavior is advantageous to the continuation of our species, but it's merely an expression of a trait. You haven't explained the trait but instead latched onto an expression of it that our society has labeled as 'greed' and, for the most part, claims to discourage (despite what you thought, this makes no claims about capitalism as a system, but rather to state that capitalists simultaneously believe that greed is socially repugnant but somehow essential to our survival (as your post exemplifies).
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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann
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