>
> ”to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion
> and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of
> usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those
> walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least
> thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and
> prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us
> how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful
> people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies
> of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.”
I love Keynes, and I agree with the sentiment in the passage above. However, I think we need to analyze this "money for its own sake" vs. "lily of the field" dichotomy a bit more carefully. For instance, I'm putting some of my teaching salary into a retirement pension (with some help from the state of Washington); that's money I could be having fun with now. Is that me wanting to accumulate money for its own sake? If you say, "No, you're just going to do something with it later, when you're not making so much money--that's not avarice!", then delayed gratification is justified (even for multi-millionaires who want their offspring to "have fun" with the money). --And if you say "Yes, that is love of money for its own sake; carpe diem! Get your ass to Paris and camp out in the Louvre for a month!", then you're offering pretty reckless financial advice for someone in a currently existing capitalist society.
I realize that this is a rarified concern of the disappointingly small proportion of workers in the U. S. who have some income above and beyond what they need to subsist, but I've been grappling with the moral ramifications of the ownership of capital. Granted, my slice of corporate ownership of Microsoft, Coca-Cola, et al. in my retirement account is almost imperceptible, and I'm planning to put the money to good use, but I'm still ambivalent about this. How do other people negotiate this moral dilemma?
Miles