Greed or Megalomania ?

I recently noticed a newspaper article about pay increases for senior NHS managers.  They had an increase of  7.6% while nurses got 1.9%.

The story is a useful  reminder that  it is not only in the private  sector that those at the top award themselves lots of other people's money. The sums of money seem to be much smaller in the public sector, though that may partly reflect greater job security.

However making money is not the only motive for the ambitious. They also seek power and prestige, and I those are often more important than money. 

That is one of the reasons communist states have failed.  Outraged by the concentration of power in the hands of a few rich people, communists thought they could neutralise that power by ending private ownership of industry. If they ever did that, their success was only temporary.

The ambitious in one generation may be stripped of wealth and power, but ambitious young people growing up in such a society will realise that there is only one way to make a mark – rising to  a senior position in the state bureaucracy. So people of the type who, in a capitalist economy would be rapacious captains of industry, will in a communist state hold the power; more power balancing less money.

Remember what happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Senior Communist bureaucrats, joyfully discovering something called 'privatisation', sold themselves state assets and transformed themselves into the 'oligarchs'

The stereotypical argument between communists and the defenders of capitalism misses the point.

One  side denounces capitalists as greedy monsters who can be neutralized by transferring power to public spirited public officials, and the other represents them as public benefactors .

I think the truth is that many prominent people are greedy monsters, but it is only the chance to make money in the private sector that distracts many them from the pursuit of political power.

Letting them make money seems to be a lesser evil than letting them rule, quite apart from the fact that to prevent megalomaniacs from making money involves also hampering the activities of many other people who are not megalomaniacs.