The greed you tout as a virtue is responsible for external financial, emotional, environmental and other costs that are astounding in magnitude. Here are a few examples:

- Food and beverage companies engineer products that are designed to maximize our consumption of them at the expense of our health, emotional well being, and often our lives. What do you think the cost of early death and type two diabetes is on our society? What is the emotional cost of people who struggle with their body image every day and are sold “solutions” that only make the problem worse by the same companies?

- Drug companies - driven by greed - have produced an epidemic that has claimed more than a million lives. What is the cost of the pain of children who have lost parents, parents who have lost children, and young people whose promising lives were destroyed?
- social media companies have known for years that their products lead to higher suicide deaths. Many, many parents have put their children in the ground as a result of social media. The companies’ own data confirms this. Their response? Making an instagram version for kids. Why? The greed you tout as a virtue.
- plastic companies have known for decades that their products would always be cheaper to buy new than to recycle. They marketed them intensely as highly recyclable. Why? The greed you tout as a virtue. The result: plastic is filling our oceans while its nano particles are filling our cells. What is the cost?

Alcohol companies know that the highest consuming 10% of adults in our country consume more than had the alcohol sold. The lives of these people, and the people who love them, are irreparably damaged by the quantity of alcohol they consume. Half of all murders are committed by someone who is drunk. Half of all murder victims are drunk. When the murderer and victim are intimate partners, the fractions rise to two in three. How do alcohol companies respond? Fund studies that promote drinking as healthy, lobby against labeling alcohol as a carcinogen and anything else that tends to reduce consumption, and market alcohol as a product essential for social engagement.

I could go on, and on, and on…

For more info, read about what Hugh Nibley calls “the Mahan principle.”