As far as I could tell from listening to a synopsis on NPR, the most interesting aspect of Creative Capitalism boils down to a conversation between Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Gates, whose company made vast profits when it created a niche and shut out competition, thinks that corporations should spare some of their resources for charity. Buffett, who managed a firm that thrived in a fiercely competitive environment, thinks that donating corporate resources to charity amounts to stealing from shareholders.

I hope it will not shock readers to reveal I side with Warren Buffett. Wonderful as it sounds when that people like Bill Gates finally realize that he could never spend all his money (I bet he thought about it), his initiative has the look of a food-sick morbidly obese man weighing whether to donate some leftovers. Corporate philanthropy, at least the systematic version proposed by people like Gates, strikes me less as a great idea than a depressing symptom of a second gilded age. Andrew Carnegie’s huge gifts was nice but America still won when we changed the system to make them unnecessary. Modern noblesse oblige, insofar as it survives the looming depression, is mostly a sign of how far our economic system has decayed from whatever high water mark we hit in the mid 20th century.

It may sound weird from an unapologetic liberal, but some days I feel like one of the few capitalists in America. I think the job of private enterprise is to make money, and as far as I’m concerned that is a good thing. I think that free enterprise helped win the cold war. However, supporting capitalism means more than some Randroid fantasy of benevolent merchant overlords. You expect a private business to serve the public good like you hope that the hospital IT guy can remove an appendix. There might be some who can, but it hardly seems fair given his job description.

The key point is that believing in capitalism should mean supporting the idea of separate domains. The domain of private business has nothing to do with the public interest. That is the government’s job. Building on that point, I don’t blame tobacco executives or wall street traders for looking after their shareholders and their own fat parachutes. Like Gordon Gekko I don’t think that greed is anything shameful in business. What else motivates a successful executive? I suppose if we added up people motivated by a passion for floor tile, radio components, empire building, showing up the rest of the high school reunion and changing the way America works with fiber-based insulation we might run a decent sized city. For the rest of the country greed will have to do.

The job of business is to make money. That is greed, and it’s fine. Liberals and, these days, practically everyone who blames a crisis on ‘greed’ either have no idea what they are talking about (liberals), or they are making pointless noise from the food hole to head off useful discussion (Republicans). Greed only breaks the system when the other domain falls asleep at the switch. If the public interest depends on tobacco companies disclosing the carcinogenic addictives in their product or Wall Street execs not leveraging each other to the point of catastrophe then it is the job of government to mandate those things. It is silly to expect a business to sacrifice for the long-term public good if that means that in the short term the business will lose market share and replace its executives.

At the risk of belaboring an obvious point private business is good and even vital, but it is only good for the things that it is good at. Schemes that interfere with the appropriate domains of business and government, whether it comes from overstuffed entrepreneurs like Bill Gates or appeals by Republicans to the benevolent self-regulating magic of private enterprise, unnecessarily complicate what should be a fairly simple picture. Such efforts inevitably get ignored (Gates) or else they destroy the same system that they naively fetishize (Republicanism, with an assist from Clintonomics).