Human Progress Is a For-Profit Enterprise

This latest entry from Prager University, featuring author and economics professor Walter Williams, does a fantastic job demonstrating the practical benefit of the profit motive. Profit, so often vilified in the modern political discourse, makes civilization as we know it possible. Without the profit motive, the relative affluence of the twenty-first century would not exist.

What Williams doesn’t directly note, however, is the moral basis of profit. We shouldn’t abide profit-making just because it enables civilization. We should abide profit-making because those who work hold exclusive claim to the fruit of their labor.