Profit has earned the venomous damnation of many – particularly those who prefer government to business.  But in my experience a rise in the ratio of business activity to government activity is a cause for moral celebration.  Whereas governments do grant benefits, those benefits are often divorced from costs and may even be ill-gotten when the coercive power of collective action is used to extract monies from some individuals in order to simply transfer them to others.  True business profits occur only through a quid pro quo in which value is created on both sides of an exchange.  There is no coercion and there is no force.

The commercial world is filled with a multiplicity of diverse communities that are served, not damaged, by businesses of all sorts, stripes, sizes, and origins:  businesses that share but one common purpose – to make a profit.   My father’s drug store was one of them.  Each of the vignettes above revolves around that small community store and the lessons that I learned quite early in life regarding business, morality and profit.  Exchange makes us better off, freedom and life require us to take responsibility, and we are all part of at least one larger community.

Each of these lessons has broad applicability.  The exchanges I make every day cover an almost incomprehensibly wide array of goods and services that are delivered to my household by firms ranging from local sole proprietorships to large, “faceless”, multinational corporations.  Each exchange is under-girded by numerous other communities of exchange infused with deeply human arrangements based upon the moral behaviors we call trust and integrity.  Market exchange is simply a natural outgrowth of human action.