Trade creates wealth. Profits direct businesses toward activities that increase wealth. Competition increases efficiency and innovation. Taxation and regulation discourage production and destroy wealth . Political decision-making favors plunder over production.
Central planning wastes resources and retards economic progress.
Profits direct businesses toward activities that increase wealth. It is fashionable today to talk about the need for business to temper its pursuit of profits by being more socially or environmentally conscious. The concern that business people behave responsibly and with all due awareness of the ways their decisions affect other people is certainly noble and good. But the implication that pursuing profit is socially irresponsible is based on economic misunderstanding. Profits are not snatched from the mouths of hungry children by greedy businessmen, they are earned by people who provide a product or service that other people are willing to pay for.