Wealth-tax-wise, it’s certainly a question, and Paul Krugman, rather lamely, tries to answer it (They need to keep their competition with other billionaires going; they are petty insecure egomaniacs).

Hoarding of pointless billions, more generally, is a fascinating behavior. Harvard University – closing in on a $55 billion endowment – still asks UD‘s husband every few weeks to leave it all his worldly goods. Unimaginably rich people grasping self-destructively after money they don’t need is fascinating.

Greed on a much smaller scale we know all about; we couldn’t have classic literature without it. (Start at 1:50.) But refusal to shear off the odd billion from, say, $335 billion, for the common good, is truly puzzling. That is, one can sort of perceive a kind of panic in people like Fanny Dashwood (again, see 1:50); the intimate, familial, cruelty of her grasping, and the comical fact that she literally does fall upon every single stray farthing in her vicinity, sketch a human type, a baleful character, recognizable from our observation of, say, certain children who steal other children’s toys, and throw a tantrum if you try to take any of theirs away, even temporarily…

But words like pathological tend to get rolled out when unconscionably vast sums are hoarded, or trivialized, as in Robert Hughes’ comment about the 2004 sale of a Picasso:

When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological. As Picasso’s biographer John Richardson said to a reporter on that night of embarrassment at Sotheby’s, no painting is worth a hundred million dollars.

And that was 2004. We’re up to $450.3 million for a da Vinci. No painting is worth … five hundred million dollars?

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How bout this.

Melanie Klein … saw greed as part of human nature, [and] she traced it back to the death drive. Human beings are unavoidably self-destructive, she argued, and we project that destructiveness onto the outside world in the form of insatiable acquisitiveness, envy, and hate. “At the unconscious level, greed aims primarily at completely scooping out, sucking dry, and devouring the breast,” Klein wrote, describing the primal instincts of infants and psychotics. Though later psychologists have questioned Klein’s all-pervasive belief in the death drive, or Thanatos, many agree with her that there is an existential connection between our mortality and our desperation to acquire good things. Essentially, it’s death that makes people “greedy for life”; we seek to get as much as we can for ourselves before the game is over.

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Some suggested reading. An excerpt from it, taking a position a tad different from Klein’s.

A woman who titled a collection of essays The Virtue of Selfishness, [Ayn] Rand was given to brackish candor. Yet at a time when many people think that the common good is more often imperiled than empowered by unbridled greed, she provides an alternative defense of the acquisitive instinct by appealing to an ethics of gross achievement and a formulation of personal liberty that looks with suspicion and disdain on any talk of civic duty, moral obligation, or even prudential restraint. Her aim was simple: To relieve greed, once and for all, of any moral taint.