>>189079, >>189080, >>189081, >>189082, >>189083, >>189084, >>189085, >>189086, >>189087, >>189088, >>189089, >>189090, >>189091, >>189092, >>189093, >>189094
This can go on and on and on and on talking about all of the generally beneficial, moral, practical, and good reasons to support the profit motive, which is little more than the securing of private property, the right to set the terms of your own exchange (but I repeat myself), and facilitating means of exchange (like money). It's literally just the logic of the ecosystem, and the logic of the ecosystem is the logic of society, no matter how much people want to change that with dumb ideological programs.
(No, human beings will not evolve beyond the logic of the ecosystem. In fact, that's not just wrong but a category error. Society IS an ecosystem, and that's not based on human nature itself.)
Profit, when you actually understand what it is, is more than just an incentive structure and the glue that holds "extended society" (per Hayek's terminology) together. Profit is evidence of service.
One of the things socialists tend not to understand about profit is that it's the excess price people will pay to obtain a good or service without having to provide it directly for themselves (subsistence). Profit is the amount over the raw value of a thing people will willingly and gladly part with from their own as a showing of a kind of gratitude for what they're receiving through someone else's effort. Smart people are glad to pay toward reasonable profit, too, because they want good producers to feel incentivized to keep producing. The flower that produces the best nectar will attract the most bees and hummingbirds.
Finally, as I've already stated, profit actually is the only way wealth can be created and distributed. Wealth is the accumulation of problem solving capacity, essentially, and it is therefore the accumulation of surplus value obtained in every exchange of production, goods, or services.
People pay for products at the price they're offered because they are convinced, frequently rightly, that they will have more value by buying the product than by leaving it. People sell products because they are convinced, frequently rightly, that they will have more value by selling the product (exchanging it for money or other stuff) than by keeping it. Both parties do the exchange because they believe they'll have more after the exchange. That surplus value that is created in the act of mutually profitable exchange is... wealth. Wealth is both created and distributed by this process, and the engine of the process is profit.
So, like I said, this could go on and on, and I hope it does. I think we need a lot more people a lot more of the time preaching about the practical and moral good of profit because our society desperately needs to hear it right now.
In the end, there are two kinds of mindsets: the profit mindset and the welfare mindset. The profit mindset is the logic of the ecosystem, and we live in an ecosystem. The welfare mindset is a poison that denies the reality of the ecosystem mindset in favor of something wrong where they get a handout, which is mostly a downward spiral.
In nature, there's no free energy, and the same is true in human ecosystems, which we call society. We need to preach the good news of profit.
https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/2081784226450743312
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