When did Profit become a dirty word?
I was reading another forum and a fellow named Bryan James said this:
"I've realized recently that in a number of debates I've been involved in the people I'm debating against invariably start blasting making a profit. This is on a wide variety of debates from Health care to War to Farming and broadcasting.
These people always complain about profit mongers without listing specific examples or alternatively giving single instance examples of extreme cases without citing statistics or verifiable sources...
This country, and indeed the world was built on the back of innovation, hard work and profiting from them and I'm going to stand up and say that's OK. If someone (or some company) can't profit they have little or no incentive to innovate. This is ultimately what has destroyed ever communist country that has come into being. If you work all day as hard as you can, and I sit and do the bare minimum it takes to get by and in the end you will never be rewarded for your hard work and will always get exactly what I get how long will you keep busting your [butt] before you say it's not worth it and slow down as well minimizing the output of whatever it is we're doing.
By the same token if a health care research firm can't recoup the costs of developing a new drug, let alone make a profit how long do you think they will continue researching? Even if they break even that essentially means they can never develop more drugs than they are currently making because without profit they can never expand their facilities so they can develop more drugs at a time and make more profit."
What do you guys think?
Bruce,
I completely agree with you. There is no such thing as a non-profit. There are either organisations that make money and thrive or fail. You have to have surplus. If your end goal is to break even, you will never reach it. I know for a fact that IHC, one of the larger "non-profit" organisations has enormous surpluses. Why because if they didn't one bad year and they would be finished.
So the question remains why is profit such a bad thing?
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I am involved with about 24 local (Southern Utah) non-profits, all of which are providing very good non-profit services. It is always interesting to see the faces of board members when I start to explain that their non-profit needs to make a "profit" (in the case of a non-profit -- a "surplus"), and, in fact, a prudent board will generate a surplus equal to at least one year's budget. Suddenly, the idea of a "profit" takes on a whole new meaning and actually makes sense.
There is an economic principle called "The tragedy of the commons" which states that if something is so valuable that it belongs to everyone (the basis premise of communism) then it, in fact belongs to no one and no one takes care of it and it will waste down to nothing. The principle came from England where they used to have common grazing fields in communities that anyone could use for free. Quite quickly they observed that these common fields lost all of their grazing grasses and became useless whereas private fields were maintained and fluorished. For some reason, the ideas of private ownership, work and reward, and the virtue of profits have to be continually rediscovered and nurtured.