Greed

There is a particular hour on the waterfront, before the fog has burned off, when a hundred men stand in a half-circle in the cold and wait to be chosen. They called it the shape-up^[1]. The hiring boss walks the line like a man buying mules. He knows which ones slipped him a dollar last week, which ones bought him a drink, which ones have a wife sick enough to make them desperate and quiet. He points. You. You. You. The rest go home with nothing, and tell their children the boss didn't need them today.

I have stood in that half-circle. And I am here to tell you that nothing about it was natural, or necessary, or fair. It was Greed, wearing the good gray suit of business, doing the only thing Greed has ever known how to do: turning one man's need into another man's profit, and calling the arithmetic a market.

I begin the seven with Greed because he is the first of the thieves and the father of the rest. Every other injustice in this country starts with the same plain theft. Somebody decided that a human being's labor—his hours, his back, his skill, his one and only life—could be bought as cheap as a ton of coal, and that the difference between what that labor was worth and what the man was paid belonged, by some law nobody ever voted on, to whoever happened to own the dock.

The first lie is that a man is a commodity. Greed cannot operate until you have agreed to this one idea, so he works very hard to make it feel obvious. A bushel of wheat has a price. A barrel of oil has a price. And an hour of a longshoreman's life, says Greed, also has a price—set by supply and demand, the same as wheat. But a bushel of wheat does not go home at night to a cold flat. A barrel of oil has no children. The moment you let Greed file a working man in the same drawer as the freight he carries, you have already lost the argument, because you have agreed that his suffering is just a cost, like spoilage, to be kept as low as the traffic will bear.

The second lie is that the price is fixed by nature. "The market sets the wage," they tell you, as though the market were the weather, as though no human hand were on it. But I have seen the hands. The wage on that dock was not set by nature. It was set in a paneled room by men who had agreed among themselves what they would pay, and who broke every union that tried to change the figure. They called it the market so that no one could argue with it—because you can argue with a man, but you cannot argue with the rain. That is Greed's oldest trick: to commit a human decision and then blame it on the sky.

The third lie is that the worker is free. "If he doesn't like the wage," says Greed, "he is free to quit." Free to quit and do what? Free to stand in a different half-circle in a different cold and wait for a different boss to point at someone else? A hungry man's freedom to refuse a bad wage is the freedom to starve a little faster. That is not liberty. That is a gun with good manners.

Now I want to be careful and fair, because the comfortable people will try to twist what I am saying. I am not preaching against a man who wants to feed his family. The grocer who hopes to do a little better this year than last is not Greed. The mother who saves a few dollars against a hard winter is not Greed. Wanting enough is not a sin; it is the most human thing there is.

Greed is something else. Greed is what happens when wanting more is lifted up and made into the organizing principle of a whole society—when a man who already has ten million dollars lies awake at night scheming how to pay the men on his docks nine cents an hour less, not because he needs the nine cents, but because the having of it has become the only thing he can feel. That is not appetite. That is a sickness that has learned to call itself success.

And here is the part the pulpit always misses, so let me say it plainly. I do not care, finally, what Greed does to the rich man's soul. Let the preachers worry about his soul. I am worried about the child across town who goes to school with nothing in her stomach because Greed decided her father's full day of honest work was worth a little less than a roof and three meals. That is not a sin against Heaven. It is a crime against a living child, committed in broad daylight, and the only court that can try it is us.

People will tell you this country was built by Greed—that it was the hunger for profit that raised the cities and laid the rails. Do not believe them. Greed did not build this country. Greed sat in the office and counted it. This country was built by the men in the half-circle, by the women in the mills, by the immigrant and the freedman and the farmer, by people who pooled what little they had and got up before the fog and did the work. They built it. Greed merely arranged to own it afterward.

And underneath all of it, America keeps an instinct that Greed has never been able to kill: a stubborn, plain, almost embarrassing love for the underdog. We do not, in our best hours, admire the man who wins by keeping others out. We admire the one who shares the last of the bread, who stands with the weaker man, who refuses to step on a neck to climb. Greed knows this about us. It is why he spends so much money trying to convince us that selfishness is just good sense, and that the man beside us in the cold is a competitor instead of a brother. Do not let him.

Because Greed has a weakness, and it is this: he cannot pick a pocket that has another hand holding it. In 1934 the men of the waterfront stopped shaping up. They refused, all of them at once, to stand in the half-circle and be chosen like mules. They demanded a hall where the work would be handed out fair, by their own people, in turn^[2]. They did not abolish Greed—no strike ever has—but for the first time they took the lock off the door he had been guarding, and they did it not with a sermon but with their solidarity. That is the answer to Greed. Not charity, which leaves him in charge and merely asks him to be kinder. Solidarity, which takes the decision out of his hands.

The barons have new names now, but it is the same old animal. In the old days we called them robber barons—Gould and Vanderbilt and Rockefeller—the men who owned the rails and the oil and the steel, and through them owned the country. They did not pick your pocket on the street. They owned the road your pocket had to travel, and charged it coming and going^[4]. We thought, when we broke a few of them, that the breed was finished. It was not. It only changed its clothes.

The barons of our own time do not own the docks or the rails. They own something stranger and closer to the bone: the machines that now carry our words to one another, the wires that move our money, the glowing rooms in our own hands where the modern man does his thinking and his hoping and his grieving. They are richer than Rockefeller ever dreamed—richer than whole nations—and a handful of them have piled up fortunes so large the number has stopped meaning anything to a human mind. It is just a score now. A score in a game whose object they have forgotten.

So let me say a hard thing to them, the way you would say it to a brother throwing his life away. You have lost the power to see your own power. The endless reaching for more has put a film over your eyes, and now you imagine your strength is the size of your hoard. Any miser can have a hoard. Your real power—the power no king in history ever held—is the power to lift millions of lives with a single decision: to end a disease, to open a thousand schools, to pay an honest wage to the very people who made you, to bend the whole arc of this age toward healing instead of ruin. You are sitting on the only kind of power that outlives a man, and you are spending your one short life chasing the only kind that doesn't.

Carnegie himself said it, and he was no saint: the man who dies rich dies disgraced^[5]. He understood, at the end, what the reaching had cost him and what it could still buy back—not another mill, but a kind of immortality. Not a name carved on a tower that will be torn down and forgotten, but the boy in some small town who learned to read in a building you made possible, and who never once knew your face. That is the only immortality money can purchase, and it is for sale to every one of our barons right now, today, at a price they would not even feel.

But Greed will not let them pay it, and so Greed, in the end, robs them too. This is the part the rich man never believes until it is too late: the thief does not work for you. He works on you. He walls you off from the only things that were ever worth having. He turns every neighbor into a rival, every gift into a transaction, every quiet evening into another hour of anxious arithmetic. The man with ten billion dollars and not one soul he can trust is not the winner of the game. He is the most thoroughly robbed man in the country—robbed of friendship, of rest, of the plain dignity of being loved for something other than his money—and he handed it all over himself, a little at a time, in exchange for a number.