Can any leftist or anyone with socialist knowledge, explain to me why profit is evil, wrong.. etc?
If it`s wrong than how will a society prosper?
What does non-profit mean anyway? I hear my friends idolize a non-profit world, yet they never explain it to me.
I think the gist of it goes like “I plowed the fields while all you did was sell the fruits which wouldn’t exist without my work, you don’t own this land its ours because you asked me to work on it and any money you make selling fruits we should distribute in terms of who worked harder”
Thier answer to you will be with redefinition of profit, and a few mental constructs demonstrating exploitation.
Because value (including labor’s) is objective. Hence, every profit from an exchange implies a (zero-sum) loss to the other party, which implies exploitation. Society will prosper by minimizing such explotative exchanges and by maximizing fair exchanges whereby only things of equal (objective) value are exchanged, hence eliminating exploitation. That’s it in a nut-shell.
Z.
That`s their reason lol?
It’s a perfect storm of ancient selection pressures.
In a social context, a leader exerting their dominance is necessarily taking reproductive opportunities from you. So, it’s advantageous for those on the bottom to despise and try to overthrow those on top and replace them with themselves, so they can have the reproductive opportunities for themselves.
Humans don’t need to rely on brute strength to do this: We can argue linguistically that we should be the leader instead, and try to get the rest of the group to go along. However, humans also have the ability to detect lies. So, someone who honestly believes that everyone would be better of if they were in a position of power, also has an advantage.
“Look at how Mungamunga keeps most of the food to himself and his close friends! If I was leader, I would share it with everyone equally!”
There’s quite a few more contributing to socialism’s instinctive appeal, but these are the main ones relevant to the topic at hand. These genes haven’t changed that much since the economic modernity. Applying the instincts to the modern world, you get socialists despising the rich and writing fantasies of how perfect everything would be if only they were world dictator.
It comes back to this. They think if everything was “free”, we could all just have all the goods we want and there would be no scarcity. Therefore, demanding money in return for goods means artificially restricting other peoples access to wealth for your own selfish gain. Profit is an euphemism for “creating scarcity so that you can get rich”. If we all just stopped wanting profit, resources could be distributed without the artificial restrictions of the profit motive, and become more abundant.
The emotive reply from many socialists is that there are hungry people somewhere and others are driving their ferraris, they see them as putting their profits above people. The more subtle criticism from more advanced socialists is the amout of profit, so while they believe a little profit is tolerable, lots of profit is evil, because somehow making lots of profit could only have been made at loss of others.
If your friends are from USA or Western Europe, they will have higher standards of living than 90% of the world, they probably think themselves belonging to the common man, I suggest they share their income with the other 90% of the people out there, if they think profit is so wrong.
Interestingly they only speak about Profits, and that Profits can only be reaped by capitalists, because they are privileged. But how then is it even possible that a so called powerful privileged capitalist suddenly makes a Loss? Forgot to use his privilege, or a sudden mind change to altruism?
I don’t see how the exploitation theory could logically explain the existence of Losses on the side of capitalists.
Nevermind that profits and losses are made by a different role, entrepreneurs.
Capitalists earn interest.
Irrelevant specifics. Both are unjust income..
Edit: There is one problem with your statement. Also an interest earning capitalist may suffer losses. His wealth is in the capital he owns. If he misses for example a technical innovation, his capital good might soon be worthless which is in my eyes also called loss.
A friend of mine thinks that someone who buys goods cheap from one side of the country, then improts them to the other side where they are scarce, to then sell them at double(price gouging) is evil.
Many believe that’s evil and he’s stealing.
It’s called arbitration. “Price Gouging” I would say is more along the lines of a monopolist charging prices for a product or service where the total average revenue from the product or service far exceeds the total average cost of the firm to create said product or service.
Your friend needs to define “price gouging” in their terms.
“Price Gouging” I would say is more along the lines of a monopolist charging prices for a product or service where the total average revenue from the product or service far exceeds the total average cost of the firm to create said product or service.
Which is exactly what happens during arbitration, modulo monopoly, no?
A friend of mine thinks that someone who buys goods cheap from one side of the country, then improts them to the other side where they are scarce, to then sell them at double(price gouging) is evil. Many believe that’s evil and he’s stealing.
Is it better that those goods not make it to the other side of the country at all? This sort of thing came up during huricane katrina. Eutrapeneurs sold water and generators or something at a huge markup around hurricane Katrina and the whole country went into an uproar about how unethical it was and, if I remember correctly, the authorities got involved and stopped the behavior. The alternative would be to not have any water or generators available around hurricane Katrina… and somehow that is better.
Aside from the Marxist objection to profit described already, there is another possible rationale that I know of:
All economic activity pushes the state of things toward the Evenly Rotating Economy.
In the Evenly Rotating Economy, there is no profit, and all wants are maximally satisfied.
Conclusion) By eliminating profits, we can achieve the Evenly Rotating Economy and maximally satisfy all wants.
But the Marxist objection, based on the labor theory of value and exploitation is probably what you were looking for.