I came this useful extension to my vocabulary in this book review today (The Price of Inequality by Joseph Stiglitz):

"The ancient Greeks had a word for it – pleonexia – which means an overreaching desire for more than one's share... The Greeks saw tyrants as fundamentally pleonetic in their motivation."
....................

Now I'll try using it.

If being 'rich' is so bad, why does so many people want to be 'rich'?

Why on earth should there be any connection between those two things? It makes as much sense as "If racism is so bad why are so many people racists".

If you want to defend pleonexia (or racism) it has to be done on other grounds than prevalence or popularity.