Profit

By profit we usually mean financial gain, but it's more general meaning is just a gain or a benefit. If financial gain is a motivator, wouldn't it make sense to harness it to things that 'profit', that is benefit humanity, rather than seeing financial gain as unconditionally good, ecept for the restraints we have put on it (illegal drugs, for example)?

The obvious example of where we've got it wrong is harnessing it to work - human labour. With one habd we're trying to be mor efficient - achieve more with less human labour, but with the other we lock work to income. Makes no sense.


Another example. Would it not make sense to incentivise people remaining healthy, or being restored to health from illness? How does this fit in with people making money from pharmaceuticals? You're ill? Good - I'l sell more drugs, employ more doctors and nurses, build more hospitals.

I don't know if money can be used to incentivise only those things which are truly socially desirable, but if it isn't, what are we doing with it.

Communism

I suppose TVP/TZM advocates might find themselves saying that we shouldn't squander our natural resources in pursuit of [financial] profit. (In Natural Capitalism terms, liquidate our natural capital and call it income). Thinking about it, I'm quite happy with "we shouldn't squander our natural resources".  That's it, full stop. Profit? Maybe, maybe not, competition? Maybe maybe not. But if competition and financial profit are not being harnessed to the end of environmental sustainabilty, or at least not against it, then they have to be sacrificed. This is nothing to do with social justice - even that is contingent on sustainability.

Profit

The word profit has been largely appropriated to mean financial / monetary profit. Even Jacque Fresco normally uses it in that sense, but a look at the excellent dictionary dot com's entry http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/profit shows that the words origins are not exclusively to do with money, and even today it can mean advantage, benefit or gain (meaning 3) in any sense, not just the money one.

TZM/TVP argue that putting profit (sc: financial profit) before human need is wrong, and we can see countless examples of this.

Motivation, profit, big pharma

The big pharmaceutical companies are trying to make profits for their shareholders. That's part of the profit system. Have a look at "Big Pharma Big Bucks" on YouTube - US based, with more direct advertising than UK, but you'll get the idea. They can effectively relaunch drugs under a new name, and we all know how generic drugs can often be much cheaper than branded ones. They also 'invent' lifestyle diseases - "disorders" that don't really have any pathology, but play on people's desire to be/feel better, in an effort to sell more drugs. The companies can't really get out of this. If company A starts marketing a new product, company B has to compete.

These companies are selling powerful chemicals, whose unwanted side effects they will want to play down, and the more they sell (ie we take) the higher their profits. Which is supposed to be better. This provoked a thought about motivation. Critics of TVP/TZM claim that without money there would be no motivation. But do you really want pharmaceutical manufacturers / sellers / pharmacists / GPs that are motivated by money if money comes from selling more pills and potions? Plainly we ideally want people motivated by making people better, and it we can't have that we must harness the motivation that money provides to that goal, and not the goal of selling more drugs.

Of course people aren't actually motivated by money - only by the goods and services that they can use it to obtain. Even the power money brings can only be used to obtain goods and services in the end. Because of the monetary system, we have an advertising industry that tries to make people want goods and services, so that they buy them and keep the profits coming in. That's the system - we have to keep that money on the move.

If we step back and look at what we actually want for ourselves, our fellow humans and our planet, a different picture will emerge. What we want from our pharmaceutical industry is good health, for example.

Barter and profit

One criticism levelled at TVP/TZM ideas (by people not familiar enough with the ideas) is that without money we would have to return to barter. They have apparently missed the point that if there is abundance, there won't be any need for trade, nor will it be possible. If there's more than enough tomatoes (say) for everyone's need, why would anyone need to trade anything for them? It is only in scarcity that the profit system can operate, so it creates it where it does not exist.

Can we have abundance in all necessities? TZM/TVP says we can. Obviously, we could stop creating artificial scarcity so that we can monetize things, but to do that we'd have to stop putting profit at the top of our list of priorities.

Profit; Democracy

A key point made by Jacque Fresco and others is that companies/corporations have a legal duty to maximise profit. In the 1920s productivity had become so high that it would have been possible to increase wages and reduce working hours and thus have a higher standard of living, but this would have been at the expense of profit. To 'solve' this problem, consumerism was developed, using advertising to persuade us to buy the stuff that was being produced, so that profit could be maintained.

Early advertising was product centred - it was informative about the product, but as it developed, it started more and more to tap into actual human desires, by depicting healthy, happy, leisured people using the product being sold, or depicted alongside the product at advertisement level. Thus the psychology is that the product the viewer sees depicted will bring, or help bring, the health and contentment that is portrayed by the people in the advert.

If companies and corporations were legally bound to maximise the fulfillment of human need, things would look very different - not to say better, so why did profit win out - it seems illogical?

Well, those in positions of power did not want ordinary people to have more leisure time as a benefit of increased productivity, as this would give them time to think, become better educated, and potentially threaten the positions of the rich/powerful. This would lead towards true democracy, instead of the limited, circumscribed democracy that we have now, which works on the basis that ordinary people should not directly participate in decision making as they are insufficiently intelligent/educated to do so meaningfully. Many critics of the current system would of course point out that the best education is reserved for those with wealth to pay for it and therefore the people in power are creating the problem that the limitation on democracy is apparently aimed at solving.

TVP/TZM does not take such a high view of democracy as some critics of our current system do. They do see education as extremely important, and done properly, education would help people to make informed decisions, thus removing one of the objections to untrammelled democracy. But as Peter Joseph points out, nature is not a democracy: there is no point voting against an earthquake. TVP/TZM argues that opinion is pretty much meaningless in the face of scientifically acquired knowledge. Expansion of that idea is for another posting.