On Meet the Press this weekend:

MR. [TAVIS] SMILEY: Pardon my English, you ain’t got enough time for that answer, David, because there’s a whole lot that should have been exposed. Let’s be honest about it. The bottom line is, one word, greed. Wall Street got greedy. And when they got greedy, it, it caused this entire economy to crash. And since they were greedy and have crashed the economy, we get a little talk about Wall Street, a little talk about Main Street. As I said last time on this program, still, David, not enough talk about the side Street.

Ah. It’s a terrible shame that “greed” was invented in the middle of this decade. If only we could go back to, say, the late 1990s, when everyone who worked on Wall Street was motivated by altruism and noble charity . . .

Now, if greed, or the desire to secure resources for oneself and one’s loved ones was a near-universal constant, we would have to look beyond “one word” answers for what caused our current economic troubles, and we might find that there’s plenty of blame to go around — from reckless lenders, to house-flippers, to those who ignored the consequences of adjustable-rate mortgages, to the Fed, to Congress not watching Fannie and Freddie, to a Bush administration that was happy to enjoy the fruits of a housing bubble, to state governors who believed that good times and high tax revenues would continue forever, to fill-in-your-preferred-villain here . . .