Profit without honor

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The following is from Thomas Sowell. Is Reality Optional? pp. 67 - 69.

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Profit without honor

In ANCIENT TIMES, it was said that a prophet was without honor in his own home. Today, a profit is without honor in the media and academia.

Nothing is more common than seeing a TV reporter describing the misdeeds of some businessman and concluding indignantly: "Human beings were sacrificed for the sake of profit." Variations on this theme are pervasive at our leading colleges and universities.

Intellectuals have a gift for seizing on the incidental and missing the essential. Blaming profit is like saying that what was wrong with Nazi Germany was that certain dreaded German words led to millions of human beings sent to concentration camps.

If the orders had been in Chinese or in Spanish, the results would have been just as horrible. There is no point crusading against the German language. The crusade against profit is just as irrational. What is really wrong is that human beings put their own selfish interests ahead of the well-being of their fellow man. They have been doing this for thousands of years, long before anybody ever thought of capitalism or of profit.

In a primitive society based on cattle, some people will sacrifice the well-being — or the lives—of others, in order to have a bigger herd. In modern dictatorships, some people sacrifice the lives of millions, in order to have power. In a society based on capitalism, the same selfishness takes the form of preoccupation with money—whether that money is called profit, salary, or government grants.

You could abolish money tomorrow without making a dent in the problem. All you would do is add a multitude of new problems, as the economy went hay-wire without a payment system.

Some of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century have come from attempts to change "the system" so that the particular form which human selfishness took in that particular system would no longer exist. Fanatical and enormous suffering went into destroying the czarist regime in Russia and establishing the Communist regime.

You no longer had hereditary despots or "the evils of capitalism" in Russia. But the new despots outdid the old, whether in tyranny, terror, or slaughter. Both in the political system and in the economic system, the evils of man were simply expressed in a different format, without being lessened in any way. On the contrary, the greater power of the state made these evils more deadly.

The Soviet experience was by no means unique. The French Revolution of 1789 destroyed the old royalty and nobility, only to create new and bloodier tyrants inside a decade. When Napoleon took over from the revolutionaries, his military adventures led to Frenchmen being slaughtered all over Europe, in pursuit of Napoleon's vision of glory.

The past generation has seen variations on this theme all over the world. The autocratic rule of Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia now seems like the good old days, compared to the genocidal ruthlessness of his Marxist successors. In some Third World countries like Uganda and Cambodia, departure of Western colonialists only set the stage for horrors differing only in scale from those of Hitler and the Nazis.

Nothing is easier than attacking a system. All systems—political, economic, or moral—cramp people's style and they don't like it. Nothing is more certain than the abuse of power by those who have it, under any and all systems, so there will always be legitimate grievances.

The fatal step is to go from grievances to the destruction of the system under which they occur. Radical critics—especially young ones—are quick to take that step. I must include myself, since I was a young Marxist. Many things looked bad to me, so I thought the whole system should be changed from top to bottom.

What forced me to change my mind was discovering over the years that things were even worse than I thought. People did awful things, not just here but all around the world, not just now but across thousands of years of history.

It was enough to turn your stomach—and make you realize that reshuffling politicians and re-naming institutions was not going to do the job even if you called it a revolution. History was especially disillusioning. It showed that some of my pet ideas had already been tried, and had blown up in people's faces.

Not all historic changes have been for the worse. But the most successful changes have been those that started out recognizing that man himself is the problem—and establishing human institutions to keep any given set of people from having too much power, no matter how noble or glorious their rhetoric might sound.

Anyone who has read The Federalist Papers knows that those who wrote the American Constitution had very big doubts about human beings in general and especially about trusting anybody with unbridled power. That skepticism shows in the Constitution they wrote and was a big part of its success over a period of two centuries, while more ambitious political experiments came and went, or turned cancerous and stayed.

The economic counterpart of Constitutional checks and balances is an economy where everyone who wants profits—or wages, or money in any other form—has to compete with everybody else. Its results aren't perfect, by any means, but it beats the next best thing by a big margin.

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Allow me to make some comments: Underneath the entire outlook of the liberal left today is a continuing yearning for Socialism / Communism and a belief in its basic assumptions and a hatred for capitalism and the free enterprise system — in spite of the way Communism has been discredited in Russia, China and everywhere else it has been tried. That is the source of the liberal bias against profit. The liberal left mentality today that so dominates in our colleges, mass media, and other centers of power is simply a modified continuation of liberal outlooks and beliefs that go all the way back to their origins in England and France at the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late 1700s. It is like a religious faith that has been passed down from father to son through the generations and sustained by liberal publications and propaganda. People are naive. People are sheep. People are followers. People are adherents of liberal assumptions and mentality in the same way they are adherents of a religion. The minds of fanatics are never changed by fact or reason. Changing someone’s mind about political ideology is like getting a person to change religions. Only people who will question and think will do it.

My background is the Bible. I have been a reader of the Bible and a strong believer in its authority and truth since I was a young boy of eight or nine years old. It has been the foundation for my life. No person who has seriously read the Bible and believes in its truth could have any delusions about the basic nature of man. The Bibles teaches us that man is a sinner, that he has a strong inclination toward sin, and that Satan rules in this world. We live in a sin filled world, a highly imperfect world, and there is no way one can get around that fact. No person who believes the Bible could believe that some socialist utopian type paradise could possibly exist, or anything close to it. He would see through all of the foolish assumptions immediately.

9 May 2024