Today during lunch we were talking about "greed", and I wanted to make a point that people don't really need money once they reach a certain threshold. In other wordds, once you have earned a certain amount of money that keeps you fed, sheltered, and clothed ( even in a rather luxurious way ) you have no real need for that extra 100 million dollars. Of course, "need" can't really be defined perfectly since it varies greatly from person to person, but for the sake of the argument let's just say that the most luxurious "need" can be met with a monthly salary of 1/2 million after tax. If that amounts to about 12million a year before tax, then people who earn more than that are basically accruing "redundant" income. Of course you can argue that the income isn't redundant since it eventually gets distributed to other entities and thus allowing the economy to keep moving along, but I'm not trying to talk economics here so keep reading.

The part I'm interested in talking about is that in my eyes, once you've met your "need", as defined previously, the reason why you're "allowing" more income to flow your direction makes me think of you a greedy person or not a greedy person. Of course, this judgement is a rather superficial one, but when people judge other people they never really know what's going on in the other person's head or mind so I think they're all superficial ( just to different degrees ) anyway. So if your motivation is primarily based on money (i.e. you earn money for the sake of accruing more materials that can be bought with money), then I'd call your $12 million +/year ass a greedy one. If you're motivation is to acquire the ultimate secret of the universe and it just happens to rake in money for you and you divert all that money (every single penny beyond the $12 million mark) back to the economy, then your $12 million +/year ass isn't a greedy one. Pu heh heh. This sounds so silly now that I've written it out, but hey... I'm just a simple and naive kid, what can I say? :)