Lobha stands third among the arishadvarga, and classical Hindu ethical literature treats it as artha's characteristic corruption in the way kama is desire's: artha, the legitimate pursuit of material prosperity and one of the four purusharthas, becomes lobha when the accumulation of wealth stops serving dharma and the wellbeing of dependants and instead becomes an end pursued for its own sake, without limit.
The Mahabharata gives lobha one of its most memorable illustrations in the game of dice at Hastinapura, where Duryodhana's greed for the Pandavas' kingdom, egged on by his uncle Shakuni, drives a sequence of escalating wagers that costs the Kaurava line everything the greed was meant to secure, a narrative the tradition reads as demonstrating that lobha, left unchecked, characteristically destroys the very prosperity it was grasping toward. Manusmriti pairs lobha with krodha as the two faults most dangerous in a person holding power over others, on the reasoning that a greedy ruler taxes and extracts beyond what dharma permits, converting a personal vice into a public injustice that falls on subjects who have no part in the ruler's own moral failing, which is part of why classical treatises on kingship, artha shastra literature included, spend considerable attention on restraining a sovereign's lobha specifically.