Re-rethinking profit

[avevale_intelligencer]

Oh, what was that line? Oh, yes:

SAM: (on protecting oil companies from being justifiably sued when the cheap tankers they choose to buy break down and spill oil all over the ecosphere) They're our client. They don't lose legal protection because they make a lot of money.

JOSH: I can't believe no-one ever wrote a folk song about that.

(The West Wing, "In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen", part one)

I may write it myself. I never knew big business was so philanthropic, but apparently it is. Or maybe it's just true that whatever you attack, someone will leap to its defence.

Actually, I'm not going to pursue this. I've done religion and politics already this year, I think I can excuse myself from economics for a while. Where I see blatant avarice and dishonesty exposed in dozens of cases of profiteering, insider dealing, grossly inflated salaries and bonuses, speculation on subprime mortgages that--I thought--caused the banking collapse and huge government bailouts, and all made possible by the existence of huge non-human entities without conscience or morality or any urge other than to amass more and more and more profit without end...maybe it really is all just the way things are supposed to be, and if it wasn't then all of us would be even poorer than we are. I don't know. I'm just an unemployed writer, and I've never been above the bottom of the heap so I don't know what things look like from up there.

Sorry.

Comments

[melodyclark.livejournal.com]

Zan, in the words of the Native American folksinger, Buffy Saint Marie, we're drowning in their gravy spills. Over here, I hope they get their fill and leave for elsewhere. Then the little economy that is left will pick itself up and do whatever it can with what it has.

The best thing to do with sociopaths is keep your head low, your needs few, and try to keep the players in sight. :(

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Reading the last 3 posts (and their comments) in rapid suceesion, I think the problem here is that you've mentally conflated "profit" (or at least, "profit made by big companies") with "the spoils of greed and/or irresponsibility". They aren't the same thing... Though one can very easily turn into the other, and thus we certainly need better ways of stopping that from happening, and of detecting when it has happened, and putting things back the way the should be.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

*snaps fingers* I always get those two mixed up.

[soren-nyrond.livejournal.com]

As a fat and ageing Nyrond with (now) a little more money than I used to have, may I say that of course it is right that some of us have, and a lot of you don't; that this is (clearly) the way that it is meant to be (after all, I can *afford* a PC to tell you that it is); and that Trying to Change Things is both counter-productive, because your energies ought to be applied to working in sweatshop conditions in order to raise my profit margins, and also anti-patriotic, because it supports Strange Foreign Ideas about All Men Being Equal, which would destroy the status quo.

In due course, a better world will be developed in which you will all be happy to work for me for nothing, and in return I will exert myself to consume more and more (in a more and more conspicuous way) so that you can see what benefits your efforts have broguht to the wider world (for I suspect that, by then, I may be an Even Wider Nyrond).

Bless You All
(by the way, that bit was said without sarcasm)