"Profit is the signal that a need was actually satisfied by voluntary choice"

"What’s always evaded when people say 'capitalism is about profit, not needs' is that profit is the signal that a need was actually satisfied by voluntary choice. 

    "No one earns profit unless others judge the product or service worth more than the money they give up. ... 

    "When they say capitalism 'fails' to supply needs that aren’t profitable, what they’re really admitting is this: People do not value those needs enough to sacrifice their own resources for them."

~ Rock Chartrand

"The Greens' vision a pathway to Venezuela"

"LET'S STRIP AWAY THE political gloss and assess the Green Party’s 2025 budget for what it is: a document heavy on ideology, neo-Marxist buzzwords, and te reo, but dangerously light on pragmatism, economic credibility, and operational realism. ...

"Fundamentally, their budget is about lifting government revenue by taxing New Zealanders an extra $88billion over four years. They have no plan for growing the economy. ... for additional capital, the Greens have decided to simply borrow more. ...

"Included in the Greens tax grab are following revenue channels: Inheritance Tax [i.e., Death Tax]... Private Jet Tax ... 10-year Brightline test ... Labour’s removal of interest deductibility for residential property ... Companies/Corporate Tax [hike] ... Income Tax [threshold] change ... Mining Royalties [hike] ... Wealth Tax...

"It is worth remembering that the Green Party only claims these policies will generate nearly $90 billion in new revenue over four years. This is an implausibly optimistic figure. The reality is you can’t just plug in tax rates and expect static revenue. People adapt and restructure in reaction to law changes and shifting systems. Sometimes they just straight up leave. These are not 'guaranteed billions.' They are some pretty wild assumptions disguised as policy. ...

"CLAIMING TO HAVE FOUND $88 billion in additional revenue thanks to taxing the shizzzzz out of New Zealanders, the Greens have gone to town spending big. ... their budget is more manifesto than fiscal plan. At the heart of the document is the assumption that profit should be avoided and the state should act to hamper it as much as possible. Other assumptions of note relate to their allergic reaction to anything that remotely suggests that adults should be responsible for their own wellbeing. ...

"In classic modern Marxist fashion, they are determined to try things that have already failed multiple times over in other jurisdictions. ...The biggest problem with [their] extensive list of spending [outside the morality of altruism and theft, Ed.] ... is that there’s clearly a lack of capacity in our systems to deliver any of these services. ...

"It is also a strategy that assumes infinite government competence. The Greens are highly critical of our existing systems and yet they want to expand them, give them vastly more power, and put them under further pressure. ...

"'As Venezuelans have learned over the past 20 years of socialism, “free things” come at a high price'.' ...

"Most depressing of all, in my view is the way the Greens would set out to cause lifelong structural dependency on the state. Accusations of Marxism and socialism are often overblown, but in this case they are truly warranted. This plan contains no serious expectations of any personal responsibility nor any incentives to engage in commerce and grow the economy. Guaranteed incomes, regardless of effort, encourage longterm unemployment or permanent student life. There’s no point in saving, working hard, starting a business, or taking financial risks. In fact, those who do would be penalised severely by the Greens through taxation. This is a social model built not on empowerment, but entitlement. ...

"This budget is a blueprint for turning our country into the next Venezuela. It is easy to dismiss the insanity of the Greens as the fantasies of the irrelevant, but the assumption that will not get close to the levers of power is a naive one. ... unless MMP is overhauled ..."

~ Ani O'Brien from her posts 'The Greens' vision a pathway to Venezuela' and 'Greens' moral crusade masquerading as an economic plan

WATCH: Greens's co-leaderette Chloe Swarbrick attempts defending the impossible against Jack Tame's timid prodding:

"Therefore, businessmen should be thanked for maximising profit, not condemned..."

"Concretely, profit maximisation consists in the maximisation of goods and services. Profit maximisation is moral only because the maximisation of goods and services is moral. The maximisation of goods and services is moral only because this improves human life on earth. Therefore, businessmen should be thanked for maximising profit, not condemned...
    "There are businessmen who prioritise profit above human life, however the logic of profit maximisation does not require this. Not only can businessmen value profit maximisation and human life, but also, in fact, by the standards of [Ayn] Rand’s ethics, businessmen cannot value profit maximisation without first valuing human life, because [in Rand's ethics] human life is the standard of value, including the value of profit maximisation."

~ Robert White from his 2017 article 'Profit Maximisation Does Not Necessitate Profit Prioritisation'

"Production *is* profit; and profit *is* production. They are not merely related; they are the same thing."

"[Observe] such meaningless phrases as 'production for use and not for profit.' ... Production is profit; and profit is production. They are not merely related; they are the same thing. They are not merely related; they are the same thing. When a man plants potatoes, if he does not get back more than he put in, he has produced nothing. This would be obvious if he put a potato in the ground today and dug up the same potato tomorrow; but it is all the same if he plants one potato and gets only one potato as a crop. His labour is wasted; then he must starve, or someone else must feed him, if he has no reserve from previous production. 
    "The objection to profit is as if a bystander, observing the planter digging his crop, should say: 'You put in only one potato and you are taking out a dozen. You must have taken them away from someone else; those extra potatoes cannot be yours by right.' If profit is denounced, it must be assumed that running at a loss is admirable. On the contrary, that is what requires justification. Profit is self-justifying."

~ Isabel Paterson, from her 1943 book The God of the Machine (p. 221). Hat tip Robert White, who notes that anyone producing goods that nobody buys has, of course, not made a profit at all. "Potatoes are not profitable if they sit on the shelf unpurchased. A sufficient number of people have to judge the good a value in the context of their own lives for a businessman to make a profit."

MILEI EXPLAINS: 21 Quotes to explain prosperity and economic freedom

Why is Argentina leading the world? Because, says its president, "while in the rest of the world the ideas of freedom are under siege, in Argentina there is a renewed faith in them.... " Here in twenty-one quotes (courtesy of @MileiExpains) Argentine president Javier Milei explains how the West got rich — and why you should care...

"The West is in danger.
    "It is in danger because its leaders long ago moved away from the ideas of freedom. Ideas that made the West the most important civilisational achievement in the history of mankind. And instead of defending the ideas that generated the prosperity that everyone here enjoys, they listen to siren songs that lead inexorably to socialism, and consequently to poverty."

"In some sense, we Argentines are prophets of an apocalyptic future, which we have already lived. All those discussions of today, based on supposedly well thought out desires of wanting to help our fellow man, based on an erroneous idea about the nature and function of the State, sustained by economic theories that have been long refuted by data and empirical evidence, we Argentines lived them 100 years ago, and unfortunately applying those ideas have led us to ruin."

"Since the 19th century, and as a result of the industrial revolution, the GDP per capita not only increased but did so exponentially. In the last 150 years it multiplied by 15, generating an explosion of wealth that lifted 90 percent of the world's population out of poverty, reaching the point that by the year 2020 only 5 percent of the global population lived in extreme poverty."

"Far from being the cause of our problems, free enterprise capitalism as an economic system is the best tool we as a species have known to end hunger, poverty, and extreme poverty across the globe."

"While the success of capitalism is easy to demonstrate, what is not so accessible to many is the counterfactual, where the systematic choice of a collectivist model leads. As I said before, perhaps the best example is the Argentinean example. Our entire history is a testimony of what can happen when the model of freedom is abandoned and replaced by collectivist experiments."

"Since 1949 the monetary base in the United States has multiplied 16 times, while in Argentina the figure multiplied the astronomical number of 25,000 trillions times. Yeah, it is a real number. I'm not making it up.
    "I repeat it, the monetary base expanded 25,000 trillion times. That is the level of disaster that politicians can produce if they are allowed to deviate from the basic principles of the market economy."

"Those who lead the West have forgotten an elementary truth, and it is the moral responsibility of those of us who still remember it to defend and declaim it. And that inescapable truth is that economic freedom, in pursuit of individual interest, produces collective benefits, and therefore the entrepreneur who risks capital in pursuit of profit is a social benefactor."

"Those who lead the major nations and organisations in the West do not give enough credit to this idea and look at the economy from a theoretical framework that believes the market is imperfect, that it produces failures, and that it requires state intervention to perfect it. The problem with this conception is that it justifies interventions that bring more problems than benefits and undermine economic growth."

"The market, presupposing free competition and a system of free prices with clear signals, constitutes a mechanism for the extraction and transmission of information in which the greater the freedom the better is the performance. In other words, the free market is a process of discovery in which the capitalist finds, on the fly, the right course of action in a constant search for profit, and that translates into offering goods of better quality at the best prices."

"Those who insist with interventionism not only impede the virtuous functioning of the market, but on top of that they congratulate themselves and exchange medals of social responsibility in pompous ceremonies, while they end up promoting an agenda of values that opens the door little by little to socialism and consequently to misery."

"I do believe that the private sector has a very clear mandate of social responsibility, but it has nothing to do with being moralistic or guilty. The true social responsibility of the entrepreneur is a natural effect of the free functioning of his own economic activity. The mandate is to produce goods and services of better quality at the best price, linked to the maximisation of profits. The social responsibility of the entrepreneur is to make money, and he can only do that by serving his fellow man with better quality goods at a better price."

"Entrepreneurs are social benefactors, far from the criticisms usually made of them by spendthrift and profligate politicians."

"Since free markets have existed we have crossed frontier after frontier. We have lifted the whole world out of poverty in 250 years. We have put men on the moon and now we are looking at Mars. And we have done it because of the ambition, creativity and optimism of men like you who partner with each other in pursuit of your happiness."

"We must not lose faith in that primal ambition that we humans have as our guide. We are a species of explorers, of creators, of inventors, not bureaucrats. And it is the adventurous entrepreneur, not the desk bureaucrat, the kind of man who embodies in the present this timeless quality of the human spirit."

"I look at Argentina with all the changes we are undertaking and I see that we are going in the opposite direction that the rest of the world, because while in the rest of the world the ideas of freedom are under siege, in Argentina there is a renewed faith in them."

"While the West turns towards control and imposition, Argentina turns towards trusting its citizens in the exercise of their freedom. While the West turns towards deficit, bureaucracy and the intrusive State, Argentina turns towards austerity, towards savings, and to retire the State from the economic activity. While the West turns towards economic shamanism and unsustainable formats of heterodoxy that endanger the future of all, Argentina returns to the path of reason, to the ideas of common sense."

"Our goal is to give back to the Argentines every peso we save, first by eliminating inflation and then, in the future, by reducing taxes as a consequence of economic growth. And we have as our north, to dismantle the tangle of regulations that Argentina has become, in order to free economic activity and unleash its productive force."

"For us, the only task of the State is to protect the life, liberty and property of Argentines, so that each one can be the architect of his own destiny. This is our vision. It is a vision similar to the one held by all the prosperous countries of the West in the great moments of their history. The task of the State is not to put invented money in people's pockets, but to ensure the macroeconomic and legal conditions so that the private sector can develop on its own."

"I want to conclude these words by inviting everyone here, who are the heroes of the history of the progress of humanity... If you believe as I do in the superiority of free enterprise capitalism. If you believe as I do that the West is walking to a slow but sure retreat. If you believe as I do that merit, ambition, freedom and innovation and optimism are essential values of the human species that should be rewarded. I would like to invite you to bet on Argentina, to help me, you who are human progress personified, to make Argentina the new Rome of the 21st century."

"It is you who can prove to the bureaucrats of the world that they are destroying the West, that the ideas of freedom are the only way to achieve prosperity."

"Let us once again embrace the ideas of freedom with pride, let us be proud to be entrepreneurs, proud to be businessmen, because they are the true social benefactors, they are the ones who create wealth, they are the ones who have taken the world out of misery. To finish, I also ask you to accompany us, the Argentines, in this rebirth of the West."

'Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success in best serving the public'

 

“Capital does not ‘beget profit’ as Marx thought. The capital goods as such are dead things that in themselves do not accomplish anything. If they are utilised according to a good idea, profit results. If they are utilised according to a mistaken idea, no profit or losses result. It is the entrepreneurial decision that creates either profit or loss. It is mental acts, the mind of the entrepreneur, from which profits ultimately originate. Profit is a product of the mind, of success in anticipating the future state of the market. It is a spiritual and intellectual phenomenon. ...
    “Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success in best serving the public. The only goal of all production activities is to employ the factors of production in such a way that they render the highest possible output. The smaller the input required for the production of an article becomes, the more of the scarce factors of production are left for the production of other articles. But the better an entrepreneur succeeds in this regard, the more is he vilified and the more is he soaked by taxation. Increasing costs per unit of output, that is, waste, is praised as a virtue.”

~ Ludwig von Mises, Profit and Loss (1951)

 

REPOST: Lobbying + NZ's New 'Aristocracy of Pull'

 

Political lobbying and those parasites they call "lobbyists" are once again under the microscope, their double-dealings being scrutinised this time by Radio New Zealand's Guyon Espiner. Good for him. And by Bryce Edwards who says "The central and unregulated place of lobbyists in politics has been identified as a key democratic deficit in New Zealand’s governing system. ... vested interests are able to convert their wealth into political influence, raising serious questions about integrity and corruption in New Zealand politics." And yet, both miss the main argument, which I make here in this repost from way back in 2018 [only the names have changed]: that there are so many lobbyists infesting the place because government itself is so big and intrusive; that there would be many fewer political lobbyists if there weren't so much to lobby about. In short, if there weren't so much political interference, the lobbying would matter so much less, and there would be far less of it ...

New Zealand's revolving door of political lobbyists -- political insiders shuttling back and forth between well-paid jobs in government and even-better paid jobs with private lobbyists -- has finally got the attention of political watchers. Turns out it's endemic, bighlighted by the various former, current, and intermittent chiefs of staff peddling their contacts with influence:

This week a perfect example of the "revolving door" of government officials and lobbying has occurred. The Prime Minister's Chief of Staff has shifted from the Beehive to a lobbying firm. Lobbyist Gordon Jon Thompson, has been a political manager – or "spin doctor" – and lobbyist for a long time, and shifts between government and private sector jobs with apparent ease... Another interesting – but less contentious – "revolving door" story [is] another former chief of staff, National's Wayne Eagleson – see: Former National Party chief of staff joins firm of Labour's top advisers...
    Thompson, who has been a lobbyist and PR professional [sic] for many years, worked with Jacinda Ardern last year, helping prepare her for the TV leaders debates. And then when she formed the new government she invited Thompson to be Labour's Chief of Staff, despite the fact that he would remain a lobbyist and director of his Thompson Lewis firm.
    Walters' article states, "Thompson finished a four-month stint as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's acting chief of staff, while chief of staff Mike Munro was recovering from illness."  This means Thompson was made Chief of Staff by the Prime Minister, with the full knowledge that he would then return to his lobbying business, where he would be involved with clients with an interest on influencing the new government. Indeed, he finished work last Friday in his job as the number one adviser to Jacinda Ardern, and resumed his lobbying job yesterday.
    The issue immediately raises issues about potential conflicts of interest....

Sure does. But this is only the very tip of a particularly large iceberg, with former MPs and MPs' wives and husbands and party hacks selling their proximity to power, often swapping roles with former advisors from the same or similar lobbyists.

Not to mention former ministers and prime ministers selling themselves to the folk they formerly regulated. 

Cosy.

Whatever the sector, a Cabinet minister who legislates/regulates in ways which are welcomed by the regulated industry are much more likely to find the post-politics doors open than one who regulates in a way the industry finds costly or inconvenient.

Selling themselves -- and at a very nice price thank you very much -- not for what they know (which in most cases is risible), but for whom.

Conflict of interest? The phrase, for these vermin, is simply meaningless. More like: "L'état! C'est ma source de profit."

Token hand-wringing against the practice appears at places like No Right Turn, bewailing that "these former public officials are seeking to leverage the knowledge and contacts they built up in their highly paid public careers for private profit"-- and he calls for "rules" around this practice. And just who does this big-government blogger think will be writing the rules?

PJ O’Rourke points out that when legislation proscribes what is bought and sold, the first things to be bought will be the legislators -- and the more legislation is written the higher the demand, and the higher the price.

Ayn Rand called it simply “the aristocracy of pull.”

One of Ayn Rand's best scenes in Atlas Shrugged has her hero Francisco d'Anconia complete the statement of one of her villains with a surprise ending. Political moocher James Taggart declares to a crowd:

"We will liberate our culture from the stranglehold of the profit-chasers. We will build a society dedicated to higher ideals, and we will replace the aristocracy of money by -- 
the aristocracy of pull," said a voice beyond the group."

This, you should be aware, is the price of big government -- it's simply what modern government looks like.

If you don't like it, then perhaps you should reconsider your support for Government-With-Everything. Because this is the essential sauce it comes with.

* * * * 

* * * * 

[Cartoon by Wiley Miller]

Morgan Godfery is an idiot

Morgan Godfery: idiot, hack, or wanker? You decide.
[Pic borrowed from here]

Morgan Godfery, who is a 'senior lecturer' at the Otago Business School, has been publishing screeds against the "obscene" profits companies have been making in these inflationary times:

In a country where inflation is running at 7.2%, [he says] and the cost of living continues to increase, multibillion-dollar profit-making is obscene.

So says Mr Godfery.

In fact, it would be bizarre if companies in these inflationary times were not making inflated profits. That is, after all, one of the effects of inflation on businesses -- that their profits are generally overstated by that very inflation that everyone faces. 

It's not that complicated to understand why: For most businesses, this is because their costs are generally incurred before their revenue -- which means they have bought inventory and supplies in a cheaper market, and are selling into what (to them) looks like a more lucrative one. 

So revenue is higher. Except it's actually not, it only looks that way. Because they also have to buy new supplies in this more highly-priced market. Which means their cost structures are way higher than they look (that is, if all you know about accounting is the sort of simple stuff that people like Mr Godfery do only to balance their expense accounts.) 

Which is why those mega-profits Mr Godfery denounces are actually illusory -- false profits, if you lkie -- and why even without the sort of Windfall Profits Tax Mr Godfery et al are calling for, companies are already paying higher taxes than they would be otherwise, already making doing business for them much harder.

Yes, it's true that in our present-day monetary setup banks (of whom Mr Godfery exercises much of his spleen) have a virtual licence to print money -- which does help underpin all their profits, let alone these record ones. But that's an inevitable function of the present-day monetary setup of fiat money, in which banks are essentially borrowing new money into existence -- a system of which Mr Godfery and his ilk are loudly in favour. (But let me know if they start talking about returning to commodity money.)

Of course, it's possible that Mr Godfery is not an idiot, and is already well aware of these basic economic facts -- especially since he is a highly-paid lecturer at a prestigious Business School. As such a highly-paid and learned fellow, it's even possible that he knows that Adam Smith was on to this very thing nearly 250 years ago, when he observed that record profits such as those Mr Godfery bewails are not at all the sign of a resilient economy that can be squeezed dry at the behest of a prestigious Business School lecturer and a gaggle of Green MPs, but instead are an inflationary effect of reckless money creation caused by government -- such high profits not being a sign of prosperity, warned Smith, but a sign of an economy "going fast to ruin."

Being a learned fellow, of course, it is just possible that Mr Godfery does knows all this and is just pretending to be an ignoramus; that he knows exactly what happens to business profits in inflationary times, and is simply pretending not to know; and that, when he does say stuff this ignorant, that he's just joining the Crowd Risible to talk up plans to eat the rich for a confiscatory Windfall Profits Tax on anyone who makes money in these imminently ruinous economic times.

In which case, it's possible that he's not an idiot at all. But just a hack.

ADAM SMITH: "High profits are not a sign of prosperity but an economy going fast to ruin."

"What the intellectuals' [and politicians'] hostility to profits and the profit motive ignores is that the quest for profit in a free market is the source of virtually all economic improvement... No less ignored by today's intellectuals is the fact that the overwhelming bulk of profits in a free economy is saved and reinvested.... 

    "The government's inflation of the money supply has a major bearing on profits ... In the very nature of the case, an expansion of the money supply operates to raise profits...."
    "Record profits [therefore] are not the sign of a resilient economy but an inflationary effect of reckless money creation caused by government - perhaps what Adam Smith had in mind when he said high profits are not a sign of prosperity but an economy going fast to ruin."

~ composite quote from George Reisman and Jim Brown, from their articles 'Profit & Credit Expansion' and False Profits respectively [emphasis added]

"In fact, the primary problem in the Soviet Union was socialism."

"One of the common denominators between Leninists and government interventionists in the West is the belief that the problems of monopoly are the problems of ownership: only private monopolies acting out of greed are harmful. These institutions are suppressing scientific and technical progress, polluting the environment, and engaging in other conspiracies against public well-being.
    "Government monopolies, however, were believed to be ethical and upright; they substituted the 'greed' of the profit motive with a 'societal interest.' Yet group bureaucrats who manage and operate the public sector are no less self-interested than those who manage and operate private business. One important difference exists, though: unlike private entrepreneurs, they are not financially responsible for their actions and they operate without institutional constraints of cost control that private property and competition induces. The enlightened minds of planners and technocrats cannot overcome the problem of economic calculation without market signals.
    "'The failure of socialism in Russia, and the enormous suffering and hardship of people in all socialist countries, is a powerful warning against socialism, statism, and interventionism in the West. 'We should all be thankful to the Soviets,' says Paul Craig Roberts, 'because they have proved conclusively that socialism doesn't work. No one can say they didn't have enough power or enough bureaucracy or enough planners or they didn't go far enough.'...
    "A common mistake Western observers made was to think the Soviet Union's fundamental problem was a lack of democracy. They completely overlooked that the institutional structure of the political system cannot overcome the problem inherent in an economic system with no means of rational calculation. The Soviet Union had a number of leaders who promised political reform, but none was able to put bread on the table. In fact, the primary problem in the Soviet Union was socialism."

~ Yuri N. Maltsev from his article 'The Decline and Fall of Gorbachev and the Soviet State.' Maltsev is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute, who worked as an economist on Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reform team before emigrating to the United States in 1989. The article is based on his introduction to the 1992 book Requiem for Marx

'Mystics of Spirit and of Muscle'

"As products of the split between man’s soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness....
    "The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive—a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society—a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself. Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man’s mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society....
    "What is the nature of that superior world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse profit. The first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit.
    "Their non-material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk and coffee, where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where pastry drops on them from clouds at the price of opening their mouth. On this material, profit-chasing earth, an enormous investment of virtue—of intelligence, integrity, energy, skill—is required to construct a railroad to carry them the distance of one mile; in their non-material, nonprofit world, they travel [across cities and] from planet to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: 'How?'—they answer with righteous scorn that a 'how' is the concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is 'Somehow.' On this earth restricted by matter and profit, rewards are achieved by thought; in a world set free of such restrictions rewards are achieved by wishing.
    "And that is the whole of their shabby secret. The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy civilisation, language, industries and lives, the secret for which they pierce their own eyes and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, matter, existence, reality—is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy absolute: their Wish."

          ~ Ayn Rand, from 'Galt's Speech' in Atlas Shrugged

          

"Reason, freedom and the pursuit of personal profit — if we can learn to embrace these three ideas as ideals, a magnificent future awaits." #QotD

"Ask someone on the street to name a moral hero; if he isn’t at a loss, he’ll likely name someone like Jesus Christ or Mother Teresa. Why? Because they’re regarded as people of faith who shunned personal profit for the sake of other people. No one would dream of naming Galileo, Darwin, Edison or Rockefeller.
Yet we should. It is they at their intellectual and productive best, not the Mother Teresas of the world, that we should strive to be like and teach our kids to admire.
    "If morality is judgment to discern the truth and courage to act on it by making something of and for your own life, then these individuals, in their capacity as great creators, are moral exemplars. Put another way, if morality is a guide in the quest to achieve your own happiness by creating the values of mind and body that make a successful life, then morality is about personal profit, spiritual and material, not its renunciation....
    "Reason, freedom and the pursuit of personal profit — if we can learn to embrace these three ideas as ideals, a magnificent future awaits."
    ~ Onkhar Ghate and Yaron Brook, from their op-ed 'Our Moral Code Is Out of Date'
.

"Keynesian economics was once only about getting an economy out of a recession. Now it’s about massive and permanent deficits coupled with massive and permanent forms of public waste" #QotD

"There are economic idiots everywhere, but the biggest ones are the ones who think government infrastructure projects like this are good for the economy. Even the Premier is beginning to see what a black hole this is. Construction everywhere you turn in the City, whole city blocks turned into construction sites, billions of dollars being spent, and not a dollar’s worth of actual value-adding output anywhere to be seen. We are looking here at immense costs, for which there will NEVER be a single cent of profit ever earned...which means [these projects] will never ever repay [their] costs in the benefits [they] provide.
    "Keynesian economics was once only about getting an economy out of a recession. Now it’s about massive and permanent deficits coupled with massive and permanent forms of public waste...
    "Modern economic theory is a disaster for anyone whose government believes any and all of it. Public spending has its role, but is a drain on an economy’s productivity. Oddly because of the Keynesian nature of the National Accounts, all of this will show up as growth in GDP even though it is nothing of the kind. And there will be many people employed, except not employed on projects that will add to the economy’s net level of real production. They are not value adding. They may create a dollar’s worth of value, but for each dollar of value created it will cost much much more than a dollar. Why does this make sense to anyone?"
          ~ Steven Kates, from his post 'Ever wonder why real wages are falling?'
.

"There were a lot of 'dead ends' in Marx's theory that led him and his followers badly astray over the 170 years since he wrote The Communist Manifesto..."

"There were a lot of 'dead ends' in Marx's theory that led him and his followers badly astray over the 170 years since he wrote The Communist Manifesto. These are of two kinds -- errors of commission and errors of omission. 

"The errors of commission include the following false beliefs which badly hampered the Marxists' understanding of how the economy worked and thus would prevent their attempts to fix its perceived problems:

1. the myth of alienation caused by the division of labour
2. the labour theory of value
3. the theory of surplus-value
4. the belief that competition would drive profits down, leading to increasing concentration and monopolisation for businesses to survive
5. the belief that competition would drive wages down to unsustainable mere-subsistence levels (the immiseration of the workers)
6. the belief that socialism would bring rational planning and economic abundance once the inefficiencies and exploitation of the capitalist system had been removed. 

"The errors of omission were the neglect key aspects of the competitive free-market system which Socialists & Marxists did not understand or rejected and which led them ultimately to misunderstand how capitalism worked. I would argue that ideas about most (but perhaps not all) of these aspects were in circulation at the time Marx wrote and that he would have come across them in the course of his deep reading of political economy, but which he rejected for various reasons. These errors of omission include:

1. the role consumers played in driving production (thus we should talk about 'consumerism' and the rule of consumers, rather than 'capitalism' (rule by capital or capitalists)
2. the importance of profits in directing producers to the most urgent needs of consumers
3. the dynamic role of entrepreneurs in making production and distribution of goods and services possible
4. the point that both parties to a voluntary exchange benefited
5. the point that services, not just the production of goods by means of physical labour, also created wealth
6. the ignoring of several other key issues, such as the role of incentives, the problem of scarcity, the problem of risk, and the importance of ideas (especially in the Misesian notion of the role ideas play in forming what we think our 'material interests' are)." 

~ David Hart, from his 2018, essay, '‘Marx and Some “Sharp Objects”and “Dead Ends”' -- part of a cross-party discussion on 'Marx and the Morality of Capitalism' [hat tip Don Boudreaux]
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"It is absurd to contrast production for profit and production for use. On the unhampered market a man can earn profits only by supplying the consumers in the best and cheapest way with the goods they want to use." #QotD

"It is absurd to contrast production for profit and production for use. On the unhampered market a man can earn profits only by supplying the consumers in the best and cheapest way with the goods they want to use.
    "Profit and loss withdraw the material factors of production from the hands of the inefficient and place them in the hands of the more efficient. It is their social function to make a man the more influential in the conduct of business the better he succeeds in producing commodities for which people scramble. The consumers suffer when the laws of the country prevent the most efficient entrepreneurs from expanding the sphere of their activities."
        ~ Ludwig Von Mises, from his ever-topical book Socialism

[Hat tip Cafe Hayek]
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