Greed and responsibility

Way, way back in the '80s, the phrase "greed is good" popped out of the movie Wall Street and was supposed to help us learn a good lesson.

What it seems we learned was that we agree.

This isn't going to be another diatribe about greedy CEOs salaries. I actually believe if a CEO is working to turn around a difficult company or makes one legitmately very successful, tens of millions of dollars isn't out of line. I'm more considering the bigger picture that got us in this more-than-difficult situation.

It was greed. And lack of responsibility.

Let's start with the lending industry. The first domino to fall in the current fiscal flameout was subprime mortgages, according to most. And it's the longest list of greedy, irresponsible people I can consider. See, the fault was, no one was responsible. The idea was to churn volume and the related dollars. Once you burned through the potential borrowers who had the wherewithal for the loans, then the pool became the less than deserving. But there was no reason for anyone in the chain of lending to hesitate, because they all just kept taking their share, selling off the loans and risk and forgetting the entire transaction. "I got mine," was all that mattered. It was a Ponzi scam of the largest proportions. Who couldn't have seen, as in all such scams, sooner or later the chain runs out?

I don't blame the big banks for all this process. I blame loan officers and processors and underwriters as a group who in their need to get their share and continue "business" just kept the scam going. They'd like to point their fingers at regulators who allowed them to do the work that way, but isn't that the old lack of personal responsibility?

And as long as I'm firing broadsides, let's take the automotive industry. Yes, it got staid and made bigger and bigger cars without really putting much effort to moving us toward conservation and new fuels. But I as much blame the unions who staff those manufacturers. When the corporate world greatly abused people, unions were a necessity. But do we believe that a high school graduate who crawled through school with an eye on the local plant deserves the types of salaries and benefits that the unions shoved down manufacturers' throats? By the way, don't ever look at hourly rates alone and think it seems reasonable. It is a necessity to factor in the cost of generous insurance, pension plans and extensive paid holidays to get the full picture of an employee's cost to a company.

A liveable wage is appropriate. But it should be related to your value to the process and your company, not the volume of people behind you threatening the company. That's playing to the lowest common denominator.

The 1970s got labeled the Me Generation, but it never seemed to stop. Baby boomers have a long history of acting individually entitled. And now the greed animal has grown strong on our lack of responsibility and is turning around in attack.