THE PROFIT MOTIVE

Any reader of whodunits will tell you that it is easier to find the culprit if you can find a motive. Perhaps because that is true, many Americans have jumped to the conclusion that virtually regardless of the crime they perceive being perpetrated, it is the businessmen who are guilty because "they all have a motive...the profit motive".

What are business profits? They are the excess of income over expenses. They represent tangibly the excess of the market value of what is produced, or the service provided, over the cost of producing or providing it...a cost, I might add, invested by the businessman at the risk of losing it it all.

In other words, what the businessman is guilty of is adding values to our lives. Who would think such a person evil, immoral? Only someone who thinks values are inately evil. Who would think that in light of the obvious evidence that values make our lives safer, healthier, richer, more enjoyable. Your home was likely built by a company with a profit motive, as was the car you drive, the food you eat, the medicines you take, the phone you use, the clothes you wear.

Who would think such values are not of value? Only someone who has a negative view of life, who does not, in the deep recesses of his soul, think man ought to be safe, well fed, entertained, happy...a person who has an inverted view of values and who has reversed good and evil.

Perhaps, some might say, it is moral to produce values but not moral to desire or to selfishly keep the immoral profits that result from such production. If you hold that view, you believe in human sacrifices...desiring, demanding with the force of government authority, that the businessman spend his effort, his effort, his time, his ideas, not for his own benefit but for the benefit of others. To label such a sacrificial code of behavior as moral is an inversion, and perversion, of the worst order.

In fact, quite the contrary is true. It is the profit motive that is inherently moral...for it represents the desire to enrich life on Earth, it recognizes the justice of the producer enjoying the fruits of his production, and it respects the law of cause and effect: the effects you cause, good or bad, are yours to enjoy or to bear the consequences of.

Beware of those who demean and denigrate and denounce the profit motive and those who have it. They have a motive of their own: to make your life value-less.