Profit - good or bad?

[Translated from Contradictio]

Profit, also known as earnings or returns, is the surplus that owners of money, means of production or land draw from business with their respective commercial means. In our free-market economy, in which the liberty of property is legally protected, profit is the recognized measure of everything: it is the lifeblood of the society, on which not only the success of the wealth of financial magnates depends -- but virtually everything.

Accordingly, an endless list can be extended for what is preconditioned on profits and their realization, as their necessary and determinant condition:

• There must be profit because otherwise no employees would be employed and wages paid;
• Profits are the Alpha and Omega of the national economy’s export success on the globalized world market;
• There must be profits in the house-building sector, otherwise who would build homes … with unpredictable consequences for the housing market, an aggravated housing shortage would be the consequence;
• There must be profit, otherwise there would be no growth and thus no money for hospitals (if they are not yet privatized and -- must throw off profit), no money for education programs, for regional development projects, highways; without profits, no tax incomes for the state to pay its officials, maintain its police and courts, the international mission of the military, etc.

This boring list of everything that depends on profit is endless and makes perfectly good sense. It should be more striking the longer the list goes on. With an illustration, the following circumstance is supposed to be already proven: The number of things dependent on profits stands for the indisputable necessity and therefore the goodness and usefulness of profit. However, this is only a naked assertion because:

Where is the usefulness for everybody if wages and salaries can never fall low enough because of profit? If, because of profit, the pace of work must be constantly increased, work times have to be constantly expanded and made “flexible”? Who does profit help if, because of it, the number of environmental catastrophes never lets up? Is it pleasant if, for the sake of profit, rents are high and continue to constantly rise? The truth is that profit is useful to those who are keen to make it or for the state, while the majority of people must allow themselves to be used as a cheap means for profit.

“Only profit!”

Critics of profit, of whom there are plenty, want to know nothing about how the application of the legitimate profit principle brings all the well-known negative consequences with it, that profit is practically based on poverty and exploitation. These critics see it completely differently. They stick to the ideal of the usefulness of profit if they are confronted with its negative consequences. If profit making does not have the charitable effects that they attribute to it, then -- they state – it is not at all because of profit, but an exaggerated handling of it. Not profit in itself is the reason for the various evils, but the exaggerated egoistic interest in it, that one thinks only of profit and nothing else. This criticism goes this way:

• Profits rise magnificently, but at the same time 15% of the personnel are laid off -- why? Because once again profit lets the entrepreneurs disegard any feeling of “social responsibility“;
• Women in the same job with same qualification are remunerated lower than the men -- why? Because Mr. Businessman never fills his wallet enough and merely because of his profit lacks any spirit of emancipation in his behavior;
• Why do apartments in the centers of dense urban areas always become pricey? Because real estate uses the demand “inconsiderately” for their profit.

So argue the critics of profit. These are loud complaints that are suited for nothing. Either profit, and concomitantly profit making, is an indispensable and beneficial invention for mankind: Then it can never be high enough, and the rulers that worry about it are on the right track when they orient towards nothing other than profit.

Or capitalistic money making is not intended at all to be a nutrient for humankind and the legitimate principle of the free-market economy necessarily includes from the beginning all the unpleasant consequences that one knows so well. Then it is damn stupid to divide profit into good and bad: What the capitalistic purpose of business organizes, works beyond good and bad …