Yes, exactly. I was endorsing the quote, not all of GG’s actions. I think we are in agreement.
Greed is one of the “Seven Deadly Sins.” Why? After all, providing for the needs and wants of one’s self and family is good.
This question was addressed by Aristotle (“the Golden Mean”) and Buddha (“the Middle Way”).
Someone’s been reading too much Ayn Rand. 
Do you approve of Martin Shkreli’s drug pricing? Yes, he’s on trial now, but for reasons unrelated to his pharmaceutical business.
Thought experiment: What if there is no risk of arrest? (In fact many wicked financial frauds are quite legal. There may be risks of civil litigation, but worst-case damages may still be much less than the profits.)
Martin Shkreli’s drug pricing is an interesting situation. In a free and open market, NOBODY can gouge prices. Somebody else will undercut them until competition drives prices down to a reasonable profit level. The ONLY way you can have a monopoly on something is if the government helps you to do it.
Epi-Pen is another good example: The holder of the brand name jacked up prices so high that the internet screamed about it. Few people bothered to note that there are generic versions of the exact same thing at a fraction of the price.
Okay. Moving on to my other question then, how do we determine when greed is good and when greed is bad? And how do we determine if a particular act should be legal or illegal?
Are you saying that we shouldn’t have patents?
Patents are an interesting compromise.
On the one hand, patents encourage people to pour their own resources into inventing something new, because then they can reap the benefit of their own personal effort and investment. That encouragement is a good thing for society. On the other hand, patents encourage monopoly (propped up by the state, as previously mentioned), which is a bad thing.
The obvious compromise is a patent with a limited duration. We could argue until the bovines return to their domicile what the ideal duration is, but the fact is that limited duration patents seem to work out in the long run.
Pretty much the same way I feel (although I don’t share your aversion to government action). Patents serve a legitimate use in encouraging the invention of new technology by allowing people to have a limited period with an artificially high price for that technology. This, to me, is an example of creating good through greed.
This leaves me confused about what your stance is on intellectual property rights. Are you suggesting that pharmaceutical patents should be for 18 years instead of 20? That’s how we thwart Shkreli?
But, more generally, the right-wing meme that governments cause all monopolies is flawed. Sure many monopolies are abetted by government — especially when the government is controlled by kleptocrats. But your capitalized “ONLY” makes me wonder how you explain, as just one example, the Bell Telephone stranglehold on telephone wires. The government fought that monopoly; it didn’t create it. How does your “free and open market [where] NOBODY can gouge prices” deal with airports? If a private billionaire owned Dallas’ airport and gouged prices, eventually people and businesses might move to Houston, but do you imagine this will be a quick adjustment? (Or, do you think a new Dallas airport would spring up?)
And you failed to address my more interesting and cogent counter-question question:
Greed is the desire to have more, when its dimension exceeds actual needs.
Wanting what you need is not greed. Wanting more and more and more just because it happens to be more, is greed.
ETA: needs don’t need to be basic ones to be “valid”. Something like wanting a pretty thing because looking at it gives you pleasure is not greed. But if you have so many pretty things you don’t know where to put them - you really, really should stop.
The heart of the problem is that drug pricing is inelastic. This means that demand is almost constant regardless of price. So the normal market mechanisms don’t work work very well, and a drug company can change prices very rapidly, before any market mechanisms to prevent that have time to work. Basically, if you’re the only manufacturer of a generic pill, you can raise prices 10,000 times, and enjoy the increased revenue for a year or 2 before another company can even get an license with the FDA to compete for that drug. (and when the generic competitors finally starts producing, it’s totally legal to lower your drug’s price to cost, overnight, in order to put them out of business)
A few things to note regarding pharmaceuticals :
a. Drug companies didn’t ‘build that’. For most significant drugs, government funded R&D did the majority of the heavy lifting, the drug company’s role was to supply the capital (the 1+ billion dollars) to do clinical trials.
b. Large government payers (medicare, etc) are prohibited from using their scale to negotiate with the drug companies on price
c. Patients don’t see the true cost usually, and have a perception that more expensive drugs are better even when they are not. Hence demand is screwy, sometimes patients will demand more of the more expensive, identical version of the same drug.
So you really can’t use 1 size fits all generic anarcho-libertarian philosophy to analyze the pharmaceutical industry. It’s not a free market, it doesn’t act like a normal market, and the government plays a massive role in shaping it. Therefore when things go badly wrong, like massive price increases, the government has to step in and fix it, because it’s from a problem the government created. In other industries, if I was the only manufacturer of titanium bolts and I raise prices 10,000 times, they will just import the bolts from another country. That’s illegal with pharmaceuticals. One obvious fix would be to say : drug companies can set any price they want, however, they are not allowed to raise or lower that price by more than <some government mandated limit>, unless they prove the cost of raw materials has gone up more than the limit and get a waiver. This is not the same thing as price controls, it’s price change controls.