(FORTUNE Magazine) – Your correspondent once (March 2, 1987) suggested and still believes that our country needs some business-side equivalent of sexologist Ruth Westheimer. Dr. Ruth created a talk show and a career by relentlessly chirping that sex is good, not bad, and you shouldn't feel guilty about it. But where is the pitchperson for ''greed is good,'' a phrase you can find in 295 articles in the Nexis database? Based on knowledge and belief, we would say that every one of those articles was written by a character aching to maximize cash flow around his own household while still feeling obliged to turn all smarmy upon coming to the greed question. Here, for example is Kevin Galvin of States News Service uncritically quoting Arnold Hiatt, former chairman of Stride-Rite and now a heavy presence in Business for Social Responsibility, as proclaiming that we are past the age of greed being good and into the era when ''enlightened self-interest is better.'' And over here is a Newsday think piece by Bob Reno proclaiming that the ''Greed Is Good'' decade of Reagan and Thatcher is doornail dead. What all the byliners know is that the phrase ''greed is good'' was planted in the American consciousness by Wall Street, Oliver Stone's mindless morality tale about finance in the evil Eighties. When uttered by the flick's Boeskyesque bad guy, Gordon Gekko -- who goes on to explain that ''Greed in all its forms, greed for life, money, love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind'' -- it drew knowing hoots of derision from audiences of every age and gender. Except for one audience we shall come to presently. But first: What exactly is greed? Although serving as an all-purpose explanatory variable in media renderings of economic behavior, the term is disdained by all serious economists. Economics, the famous Samuelson-Nordhaus textbook, nowhere mentions greed. Economists tend to lay off the term because it refers to a human impulse -- acquisitiveness -- that obviously works to maximize economic activity but that is implicitly called into question any time greed is mentioned. The term has a built-in subtext. The view around our house is that the unending attack on greed is propelled by socialist logic. If you look up ''greed'' in, say, the unabridged Random House Dictionary of the English Language, you discover that it refers to folks who are ''inordinately desirous of'' wealth, or who want ''more than one's proper share.'' The implication is that human decency requires a belief in limited shares, even for titans like Henry Ford. We mention Henry having just noticed that in the current public television documentary about the Great Depression, he is depicted as ''greedy beyond imagination'' (to quote from the Chicago Tribune review). Presumably Henry should have stopped after he made his first couple of million. The possibility that his ''greed was good'' for the world, just as Adam Smith would have assumed it to be, is not addressed in the review. This brings us to the one audience we know of that didn't hoot Gordon Gekko. We learned of these filmgoers from David Remnick's riveting book, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. Remnick is a journalist and obviously a great reporter -- he was covering the U.S.S.R. for the Washington Post -- but the book reveals him to be also capable of operating at a high level of literary art.

At one point he describes a visit several years ago to the Moscow Higher Party School. This institution, long a training ground for the Communist elite, was then in some disarray, with both students and faculty in revolt against Communist orthodoxy and inclined to believe that Mikhail Gorbachev was moving against it too slowly. Remnick did some interviews, started to leave, then suddenly noticed a sign indicating that ''an American movie'' was being shown that night. He stayed over to see it, and the movie turned out to be Wall Street, with the Russian dubbed in. The students' reaction to the movie, Remnick writes, ''would have made poor Oliver Stone weep.'' When Michael Douglas, playing Gekko, delivers the line about greed -- it's Zhdanost eto khorosho in Russian -- nobody hooted. Instead: ''The Communists went wild. There were whoops of approval. Un-ironic whoops.'' It might be necessary to recruit our Dr. Ruth counterpart from a country that has lived under socialism.