(FORTUNE Magazine) – Greed is on the march again. No -- strike that. Blathering about greed is on the march. The blather seemed for a while to be focused on insider trading, but the jurisdiction now seems to be expanding geometrically, and the liberal commentator corps has lately unearthed greed at Wrigley Field and in the Soviet Union. Your correspondent has some difficulty identifying his example of the former, as he never caught the name of the fellow on the tube who was learnedly linking the onset of night baseball for the Cubs to greed at the Tribune Co. (which owns the team). The Moscow angle is well documented, however. On the analysis of the New York Times correspondent, the emerging private sector in the U.S.S.R. has brought with it ''a general rise in the level of greed,'' not to mention ''unbridled greed,'' and, to really complicate the story line, ''government greed.'' The last-named awfulness was manifested by the Soviet finance ministry, which earlier this year proposed a 90% tax rate on entrepreneurial profits.

But it's everywhere. Over 200 Nexis citations on greed in July alone. The big news in Indianapolis was that the Star's Indy car-racing correspondent resigned his beat because the race is now permeated with ''greed and secrecy.'' And here is U.S. News & World Report editor-in-chief Mortimer Zuckerman trying to explain how come we can have rich people but also homeless people. Parsimonious explanation: ''greed gone berserk.'' Here is a prosecutor in Salt Lake City explaining to the jury that this Colombian character went into the drug business ''out of greed.'' Imagine that. Meanwhile -- can it be? -- the selfsame motivation is said to be discernible among the vestry of St. Bartholomew's Church on New York's Park Avenue, which wishes to use some of its quite valuable land for a high-rise structure. J. Sinclair Armstrong, a member of the church (and a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission), has been assailing the proposal as based on greed, not need. Notice how it rhymes? As previously stated in this space, we have never found the notion of greed to have much explanatory power. The term means (according to Merriam-Webster's lexicographers) ''reprehensible acquisitiveness.'' But just about everybody except a few saints and troublemakers is acquisitive, so all the present writer learns when you tell him that Ivan Boesky is greedy is that Ivan has somehow been naughty. In fact, many greed-bashers are obviously trying to sneak in a different message: that acquisitiveness in general is naughty. And that, being naughty, it must be outlawed. What a lot of liberal commentators are ultimately trying to tell us when they carry on about greed is that the country needs more taxation and regulation of economic behavior. We have been picking up that nuance ever since the Democratic convention. Mike Dukakis, Jesse Jackson, and Senator Bob Byrd, not to mention the party platform, have all aligned themselves foursquare against greed. Jesse's lament (''consumers gouged by corporate greed'') is as usual the least subtle, but we confess to worrying about all those guys. As is well known, ''government greed'' is not limited to the Soviet Union.