Most of us at a certain age have good friends with whom, as the decades roll by, we've split politically. One of my best high school chums — a teammate in football, basketball and baseball, not to mention general teen-aged carousing — keeps in touch with us by sending right-wing articles from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and other bastions of Republican thought. He feels that reading too much poetry has sapped my bodily and mental fluids. It's possible; I used to be taller.

I appreciate this method of communication. It's polite and pointed, and gives me time to consider the myriad fallacies in the essays he sends. The latest one was a newspaper column by Kyle Smith praising the virtues of Greed, and this has resulted in my latest Poet's Notebook column, which is my reply to Smith's column and a general meditation on Greed.

Also decades ago, I played tennis with the conservative economist Milton Friedman, so I've worked up a sweat on this subject before.

This article appears in Apr 22-28, 2009.