Elinda wrote:
Profit is gain above and beyond the value or worth of good and/or services.
That's not even close to a working definition of profit. Profit is the gain above the *cost* to provide the good and/or services, not the value of those things.
If it costs me $100 to buy the materials for a birdhouse, and I can sell the assembled product to you for $150, then my profit is $50. You learned this in school, right? What this means is that
all gains from labor are profit. Always. What I added to the cost to buy the materials for the birdhouse was my time/labor. I get that some of you want profit to be some kind of dirty word only applied to evil rich people, but the reality is that every time you collect a paycheck you are receiving profits off your labor.
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Profit is what's left when McDonalds exploits it's workers so that at the end of the day the money taken in by selling burger exceeds the money needed to pay it's workers/managers/ceo's and all expenses. If the market is working correctly, there shouldn't be 'profit'.
That's... insane. If there wasn't profit, why would anyone bother running a business? Seriously, stop and think about this. What you're saying is ludicrous.
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Everyone gets their pay. The CEO's get a nice chunk more than the managers who get a chunk more than the workers, this pay along with all expenses should just about equal the amount taken in.
That's not how it works. It *can't* work that way.
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If there is an excess of 'profit' it can only be because someone is not getting their fair share somewhere in the process.
NO, NO, NO, No, No, No! If there is a profit, it means that you produced something which others valued more than your cost to produce it. Profit is a
measure of the value you added. When you take some pieces of wood and turn it into something someone else is willing to pay more than the cost of the wood for, you have added value to the pieces of wood. Your "profit" is the measure of that value addition.
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Once this profit would have been reinvested to make more jobs, more value, more burgers and better burgers or highly taxed. But then corporations, lobbyists, deregulation, more exploitation of those that need to feed their babies and their burger addictions and wallah more profit, or super-profit if you're a marxist.
This is completely non-sensical. Profits are spent investing in things designed to earn more profits. But this isn't a bad thing, unless you've been brainwashed into not realizing what profit is really measuring. The rich person doesn't take the money he makes away from other people. Money itself has no intrinsic value. The money he makes is a measure of the things that he
provided for others that exceeded the cost to produce. I really think this is a concept that far far too many people just don't understand (and actually get completely backwards).
If I give you a shirt, and you give me $10, I didn't take anything from you. I provided you with a shirt. You gave me a piece of paper that records the fact that I gave you something and took nothing in return. Now, later I can exchange that piece of paper for something of equal value, but it's important to note that money itself measures what someone has provided to others, not what he has taken from them. And obviously, profit is the degree to which you did that in an efficient manner. It's not "bad" at all. It's necessary for the market to work.
It's also not something just rich people do. We all profit, all the time.