{"id":106037,"date":"2026-11-15T04:00:46","date_gmt":"2026-11-15T09:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=106037"},"modified":"2026-11-14T14:03:57","modified_gmt":"2026-11-14T19:03:57","slug":"eliminate-the-profit-motive-yeah-like-that-would-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/eliminate-the-profit-motive-yeah-like-that-would-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Eliminate the profit motive? Yeah, like that<\/em> would work …"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Substack<\/em>, Dan Williams<\/a> patiently explains that the fervent belief among socialists is that the profit motive is man’s original economic sin, and if we can just get rid of it, then the rivers will run uphill:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A common complaint levelled against capitalism concerns its reliance on the “profit motive”. The assumption is that it would be better to organise our economies around cooperation, mutual aid, or other elevated ideals, not the pursuit of personal gain. “People, not profit”, as the slogan goes.<\/p>\n

Some versions of this complaint rest on simple technical mistakes or economic illiteracy. For example, profit is an important signal that a firm is using a society’s resources efficiently, which is why even many socialists who reject central planning<\/a> want to keep profit-maximisation as an objective of firms. They want to change who owns firms, not what firms aim at.<\/p>\n

Similarly, many blame the profit motive for problems caused by the bad rules under which profit-seeking operates. AOC<\/a> complains that capitalism, at its core, “is the absolute pursuit of profit at all human, environmental, and social cost”, but no actual capitalist economy works this way. Societies create rules within which profit-seeking takes place. Many critiques of the profit motive point at outcomes that could be fixed by changing these rules, such as through taxes that make companies internalise the social or environmental costs<\/a> of their products.<\/p>\n

Economists and philosophers have been pointing out mistakes like these<\/a> for generations, usually with little effect. This is because opposition to the profit motive gets its energy not from sober economic analysis but from a basic moral complaint.<\/p>\n

Capitalism, the complaint goes, is powered by self-interest, greed, and personal ambition. These motives are bad. We teach our children not to be acquisitive and competitive, and we disapprove of people who exhibit these traits in everyday life. So, why would we organise our economies around them, or be surprised when those economies feature crisis, exploitation, or environmental catastrophe?<\/p>\n

It’s easy to sympathise with this analysis, but it rests on significant confusions about some basic facts of human social life and the central challenges of politics.<\/p>\n

In an important sense, the pursuit of profit is not an optional feature of societies. It is a fixed constraint on all societies that, at most, can be channelled and redirected, never abolished. More precisely, you can outlaw profit-seeking companies, but you can never abolish the pursuit of personal advantage and social standing. Attempts to do so often either push this pursuit in more destructive directions or conceal its operation in dangerous ways.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Substack, Dan Williams patiently explains that the fervent belief among socialists is that the profit motive is man’s original economic sin, and if we can just get rid of it, then the rivers will run uphill: A common complaint levelled against capitalism concerns its reliance on the “profit motive”. The assumption is that it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25,10,53],"tags":[755,1189,661,76],"class_list":["post-106037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","category-politics","tag-incentives","tag-pigouviantax","tag-regulation","tag-socialism"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-rAh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106037"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106054,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106037\/revisions\/106054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}