Profit
Every so often I hear someone bash on a company for making money. It can be any company in any industry. There are some people out there that think that it’s evil that a company’s motivation are to turn a buck.
This infuriates me to no end.
Companies have a moral and ethical obligation to make money. There are many different stakeholders in a company. These include the owners, share holders, consumers, employees, and the surrounding economy that relies on the people that make money from the company to turn around and spend most of that money in the area.
As much as I dislike Microsoft’s software for its lack of technical prowess and security, I do not dislike the business. They provide thousands of jobs and allow millions (billions?) of people to be more productive in their day-to-day lives. Microsoft has an obligation to the entire world to continue to stay in business. The only way they can do that is by making a profit. If they stopped making a profit, they would go under and vanish (barring a government step in.) If this were to happen, then the technology world as we know it would be severely damaged!
The same thing applies to pharmaceutical companies (which actually spawned this post.) They make medicine and do research into curing disease. Why? It’s big money. The individuals that work towards these goals are most likely driven to do something that will benefit humanity. The company, as a large faceless entity, is there to make money. Good. Let them. If they stopped making money, then all of the funding that they provide to the altruistic individuals that work for them will dry up. This means that tons of research that is put towards saving lives will come to an end, and that can’t be a good thing.
Money is a huge motivator, and it drives people to start companies that will make them money. This, in turn, drives those companies to excel if they can. I don’t see a problem with this at all. What’s the harm in making a buck?
Well, I have an answer for that. When the motivation of the company shifts from excelling in their field of business to making a profit at all costs, then things go wrong. Companies, like individuals, should be rewarded for their efforts. A reward to a company is profit. When the company starts to desire that reward to the point where they make decisions that harm people, customers, the environment, the government, or the world at large, then things should change.
I know that a pure capitalistic society is a bad thing. Heck, anything in its pure form is a bad thing. It leads to poor decisions and drastic inequity in the world. Note the use of the word drastic. I’m all in favor if inequity. If everything were equal, then no one would win races, all sports would end in a tie, and there would be nothing that made you more important than the next guy in your own unique way.
There are checks and balances in our laws that prevent most companies from going haywire and destroying themselves or damaging society. Yes, companies can cheat (Enron), or buy their way out of things (almost any lobbyist can tell you this.) If we were to remove campaign donations from the hands of corporations, then maybe there would be more laws and monitoring put in place to prevent abuses of power, but that’s not really the point of this blog.
What I’m saying is that turning a profit is not an evil thing. Heck, quite a few Americans (not all, unfortunately) have a savings account. Guess what? That’s money left over after expenses. If you were a business that would be called profit. It’s wise to having savings, and the same thing goes for companies. It’s wise for them to make a profit and build up a fund to help out during hard times.
If a company making a profit and saving for a rainy day is evil, then every American with a savings account is equally as evil.
