Entrepreneurial Farmer

Ambrosio R. Villorente

Greed Causes Poverty

Did you eat an egg today? Are you operating a poultry farm to produce chicken eggs? If not and have eaten an egg today, then you must have eaten somebody’s eggs.

Poultry eggs belong to a food group necessary to provide food nutrients to nourish human body and maintain good health. But eggs alone are not enough to maintain balance nutrition. A person must eat sufficient quantity and variety of food to live healthy. A person must eat six basic food groups every day. However, any person must work for his food and other needs to live a normal life. How can a person procure his daily needs when he is idle? He may live below the poverty level otherwise he steals someone’s goods, corrupts or live on charity.

Another cause of poverty is greediness of other people. Greed is defined as “excessive desire for getting or having especially wealth”.

It is a “desire for more than one’s needs or deserves”. It is “avarice, cupidity”.

Greedy is the act of “wanting or taking all that one can get with no thoughts of others’ needs like food, drinks and even power and honors”. It implies an “unsatiable desire to possess or acquire something to an amount inordinately beyond what one needs or deserves”.

Economic resource is limited. And when the distribution is uneven, others who got more than their needs accumulate more wealth while those who got less and lesser than their normal requirements live an abnormal life.

Those who got more and accumulated savings work for more and observe frugal spending. There are also those who got more wealth through dubious means like illegal drugs and gambling, graft and corruption, hold up and over pricing of goods among others.

There are also those who won in the lottery.

It is not only for money which people want more. More people are also greedy of power and honor. Some good examples of power greed is in politics. A person who got elected as municipal mayor may aspire to become provincial governor after his term as town mayor. After he/she won as governor and his/her term expires, he/she runs for congressman. Some politicians even slide to lower level position just to perpetuate themselves in power. Worst for other families would like all the family members get elected as governor, SB/SP member, mayor, and vice mayor.

Some leaders in their quest for more money and power would finally crave for recognition. How do they do it? Let us say a Mayor initiated a project, implement the project, fund the project out of the people’s tax money. After its completion, bless and inaugurate the project with the presence of several people, document the program, claim recognition of project completion, efforts and publicize it for everybody to know via the tri media. They even resort to outdoor advertising like streamers and tarpaulin. They forgot they did the project because it is their obligation and funded by public money.

More often, some public officials receive a certain percentage out of project funds.

Honor also goes by naming the projects after their close relative such as buildings, roads, and bridges.

These are greed of material resources of power and others. Let power and honor be vested to limited number of person but provide means to allow everybody have a fair share of economic resources. Avoid GREED.

Greed enables the powerful to get resources more than what they need. The lazy eats the least and live with difficulty because they don’t exert more effort to get the quantity of resources they need. /MP