Argument Analysis

While reading through the opinion section of the New York Times the other day, I noticed an article about the current financial crisis with a title I was not expecting, “A Cure For Greed” by Ecuardo Porter. In this article, Porter argued that the primary cause for the current financial crisis is greed and how greed is very difficult to escape from. At first his argument sounded too simple, but as Porter wrote, he was able to make a convincing argument.

He included three main pieces of evidence that supported his argument very well. In the first piece of evidence, he pointed out the inevitability of greed, “the Soviet Union deployed the entire power of the state to stamp out greed,” however, it “proved insufficient to blot out this insidious sin”. In the second piece of evidence, he wrote about how the capitalist country we live in encourages greed making it difficult to escape from, “economists built a theory of the world that everyone benefits when we seek to maximize our own individual welfare.” In his third piece of evidence, he reminded us of the mindset people had during the Reagan Revolution, which was right before the financial markets crashed, “the path to prosperity for all requires removing every obstacle to utility of maximization, including most regulations and taxes”. Each of the examples he used supported his argument and in each he was appealing to logic. In his concluding paragraph, he sought a solution. He wanted to “put fear back in the picture”. Here he appealed to one’s emotion, for at the moment everyone is scared.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/opinion/29mon4.html