The Greater Good Is Not Your Good

It will serve the greater good if we retire the term "greater good." Forever.

When government wants something you have — your wealth, your land, your labor, your liberty — someone reaches for this phrase.

The greater good.

The left uses it. The right uses it.

It has synonyms. Common good. Shared sacrifice. For the benefit of society. In the name of public welfare. National interest. Public interest. Stakeholder value.

You rarely hear these terms used in the same paragraph as liberty or freedom.

Although there is one synonym of sorts that is used near the term freedom. Patriotic duty has been used to support military conscription and in marketing war bonds. We’ve been told it is our patriotic duty to pay taxes. To buy American made products. To go out and spend money. During Covid our patriotic duty involved getting vaccinated and limiting our use of toilet paper.

The regular citizen might use the term “greater good” because it makes her feel altruistic, self-sacrificing, caring, while she tries to convince other people how selfish and wrong they are.

The Translation

“We are taking your property or freedom because I (and some others) decided I know—better than you—what to do with your stuff and your life.”

That is a hard sentence to say in public. The public will get pissy right quick. They will perceive the narcissism and paternalism instantly and they won’t like it.

But, “This serves the greater good” says exactly the same thing. People stand up and applaud, tears flow from their eyes as they realize how wonderful the man is who said the phrase, how generous, how noble.

The word “greater” implies that someone has measured something. But there is no measurement, or if there is, it is a bogus measurement (like GDP). And nobody weighed your welfare against a politician’s preferred outcome on a scale. They skipped the scale and went straight to the politician’s preferred outcome.

And who defines good? Not you, that’s for sure. It’s defined by someone with power.

The typical collectivist will say the greater good is determined by our democracy. He’ll stumble on this even as the words bubble from his mouth. It is so blatantly flawed logic that even a democratic socialist gets tripped up. They know it’s wrong. But they get over it. Then they use the phrase in an attempt to persuade the minority to abide by the majority’s preferred means of oppression. It costs them nothing. If it doesn’t work, the force will assuredly follow.

Likewise, the aspiring dictator uses the phrase to convince people to cooperate. It costs him nothing. If it doesn’t work, the force will assuredly follow.

The phrase assumes your consent and judges you for disagreeing. A council, a regulator, a gang of politicians, or a central bank governor decides what counts as greater and what is good. As for you? You better do what you’re told.

Greater good means the powerful people’s preferred outcome. It’s as simple as that.

The use of the phrase by politicians running for office is evidence that they are … politicians running for office. The use of the phrase by the average citizen is evidence that the person hasn’t thought it through. It’s superficial fluffery that emerges from minds controlled or numbed by a constant barrage of statism.

Greater good is a collectivist concept, a statist idea. It doesn’t measure anything in your life. But it can take your life. Or at least your property and your dignity.

How does this have anything to do with investing?

The first P in Doug’s original 8Ps that we use to evaluate resource stocks is People. Indeed, the people in charge of any company are essential to the profitability of the company. A company’s resources belong to its shareholders, and management’s job is to morally deploy those resources to create profits—not to pursue whatever social objective happens to be fashionable at the moment. If you run into a C-level officer who speaks in terms of stakeholders instead of shareholders, or greater good instead of profit, that leader is going to cause harm to the entire organization. Just like the way that a politician uses the phrase to cause harm to everyone else. Be on the lookout.

In Doug’s 8Ps, there is also Permitting and Politics.

A mining minister who starts talking about “the resource belongs to all the people” or “the greater good of the nation” is telling you something critical. That language shows up right before a windfall tax, a forced renegotiation, or an outright nationalization. Bolivia’s nationalization of lithium, the takeover of Konkola Copper Mines to “protect the interests of the people of Zambia,” Mexico’s mining law rewrite under López Obrador, Zimbabwe’s recent mineral export restrictions: they all deployed some version of this rhetoric.

If you hold a position in a company with a project in a jurisdiction where a relevant and powerful official has started using this language, that’s a yellow flag waving at you.

If you live in a country in which more and more people are using the phrase, that’s a red flag.

Sincerely,

John Hunt, MD
Editor, Doug Casey’s Crisis Investing