Hey, Cemar - But I'm a Nice Guy!

[Crazy Eddie]

I think the cardinal error would be that the Nice Guy is that he does not know himself and is not comfortable with himself and is looking for someone external to make him feel good about himself. Pretending he does not have wants or needs is merely one way to get that result.

I think you are right.

I think this is more about understanding wants versus needs. And how we should be cautious of letting our wants get out of hand. Think about it. As a society we all seem to want to have MORE things and in order to have more we want things to be cheaper. And therefore we are implicitly okay with letting people in other countries work 12 hour days 7 days a week for dollars a day in order to satisfy our wants.

Certainly we should be cautious about letting wants get out of hand, or more to the point, we should prioritize them properly. A "need" is simply a stronger want. We want oxygen very badly, but we might not always get it. So you're always making decisions about prioritizing your wants. Do you want a big-screen TV or do you want a larger house or do you want to spend lots of time with your kids and get enough sleep nearly every night? Choose wisely... you only get one life, and the clock is ticking.

And preventing people in other countries from working all those hours isn't going to make them better off, unless we've got reason to believe they are all making bad choices. We didn't run their economies into the ground and eliminate the better opportunities that they should have had. (Maybe you're starting from the assumption that we did. That's a whole nother discussion. Suffice it to say that we as a society are implicitly okay with other people in other countries generally doing whatever they think best unless they pose a threat to us or try to forcibly stop still other people in other countries from selling us things we really want. This attitude has good points and bad points.)