Observation: Profit is voluntary, not evil - Granite Grok

Observation: Profit is voluntary, not evil

ProfitKevin Williamson is one of my favorite authors and you can mostly find him over at National Review.  Here is a snippet

…The crude version of exchange — which is, unhappily, the common version — is inclined to suspect that there is an objectively correct price for a good, and that profit comes from duping somebody into paying more than the correct price for it. That error is fundamental to Marxism and other anti-capitalist philosophies, and it is implicit in such social phenomena as the anti-advertising movement, “Buy Nothing Day,” and similar political tendencies. But that bias does relatively little harm in the heads of greying Marxists, peddlers of “profit is a crime” banalities, and Occupy riff-raff. Where it is truly destructive is in the disorganized thoughts of the large majority of ordinary people with no particularly strong political commitments or economic orientation. Consider these phrases: “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay,” “just wages,” “fair price,” “obscene profits,” “price gouging,” “excessive executive compensation.” For any of those phrases to have any intellectual content, then there must be a price that is in some non-subjective sense the correct one. But if economic values are subjective — and they are — then “an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay” can only mean one thing, that being the payment of an agreed-upon wage for an agreed-upon performance of labor, with “honest” referring only to the fulfillment of the agreement and saying nothing substantive about the terms of the agreement itself…

Go read the whole thing as it points out a number of other things about profit that have been distorted by those that wish for US to make the determination what is of value to us.  No big surprise as the Leftists learned their lesson from Antonio Gramsci well (as in “Want Socialism, want Government in charge of everything?  Change not just the politics but change the institutions that change the culture.  Capture them and the culture will bend politics to your desire”).

Yes, those phrases that Williamson quotes have value in and of themselves – to a point.  What it little noticed (or worse, taught) is that unless a financial transaction is forced (e.g., not entirely voluntary, like when you are being held up or Government forces a distortion that you otherwise would not engage in – like in Obamacare in that if you do not purchase a service that it is mandating, you WILL be fined / taxed), BOTH parties profit (else the exchange of goods or services that I have for the goods or services you have would not happen).  I must believe that I am getting a good deal for my money in the goods that I wish to purchase – and you must believe that the money I am giving you is worth more than the good or service you are selling to me.  THAT is capitalism.  Period.  In a nutshell and without all of the verbiage that obfuscates what is happening.

But the idea is true – profit is subjective because I value things differently than you do.  What is valuable to me may not be to you; the price I am willing to pay may be more or less than what you would be willing to spend.  That is why Government controls on such transactions makes such a smelly trash heap of things when someone decides to get some politician or some bureaucratic regulator involved and it starts to all waddle in, crowding out what should be a private transaction.  I do believe that is what we are seeing now – where the Feds have so ramped up their controlling of so much of our economic marketplace, we see uneven GDP results and in the last two quarters, negative growth.

But it is never the anti-capitalists fault, is it?

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