From Oliver Stone's 1987 film Wall Street. Here is financier Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas) speaking at the shareholder's meeting of a company he wants to "liberate:"

Here's the key text:

"... Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

"Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

"Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind.

"And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar paper, it will also save that other malfunctioning corporation -- the United States of America."

Mr. Gecko's name came up in a Globe and Mail article on Saturday about the clash between greed and morality in a capitalist system:

Gordon Gecko, the ruthless capitalist in Oliver Stone's 1987 film Wall Street, may have been a left-wing film director's caricature of that ethos, but he was also a fair representation of a new truth: that greed in the name of capitalism is no sin.

It can even be a virtue.

Harry Binswanger, for example, feels that the current economic crisis is rooted in "a loss of respect for greed and selfishness through government action in passing laws that thwart greed."

A philosophy teacher at the Ayn Rand Institute in New York City (and once a colleague of the late philosopher-novelist for whom the institute is named), he feels that modern economists such as Prof. Friedman stripped morality out of their discipline to avoid being in conflict with Christian values.

But he (being an atheist like all true "objectivists," or Rand devotees) says he has no such qualms. "We see selfishness as a virtue, as something to live up to." He defines greed as the creation of value - a lifelong activity that requires restraint and discipline to forgo short-term gain.

As a result, Dr. Binswanger argues, companies ruined by their investment in subprime mortgages "showed they were not concerned with their self-interest. The fact they went bankrupt shows they were not greedy enough."

If there are any skewed morals, he adds, they were propagated by the left, because the doomed loans at the heart of the crisis were often made as a direct result of a federal law aimed at getting poor Americans into affordable housing. Not only did the Community Reinvestment Act require banks to lend to people who should not have qualified (and also led to well-documented cases of dubious sales tactics and outright fraud by some banks), it was also an open secret that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the agencies that bought and sold those mortgages, could count on a federal bailout if borrowers defaulted.

With all due respect to the objectivists, greed and enlightened self-interest are not the same thing. Think of it as the difference between stuffing yourself with Big Macs and eating a heart-healthy diet.

And methinks Binswager is missing the whole predatory nature of the subprime mortgage fiasco.

When talking with a real estate expert in 2007, I asked him if it was possible that some deeply cynical people in the U.S. financial sector thought that even if the subprimes caused major problems, the problem would be sufficiently big that the government would have to bail them out.

He seemed to think it was entirely possible.

Evan Solomon had a great piece on CBC Sunday Report tonight in which the word "swindle" was tossed around liberally with respects to the conduct by some U.S. financial firms that precipitated the current crisis.

The G&M article closed with this thought from Adam Smith, the first philosopher of capitalism:

He was a moral philosopher first and an economist by accident (economics didn't exist as a field of study when he was working). Before proposing his ideas about self-interest in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he declared:

"All the members of human society stand in need of each other's assistance, and are likewise exposed to mutual injuries. ... Society, however, cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another."