Profit is Not Enough Motivation

People often use profitability as a motive to explain how things are supposed to work within the dominant narrative. They say that if fewer people cost less, it makes sense that there are fewer employees, never making the link between their customer base and people with the funds to afford it. Often, profit has been used for the most horrific atrocities that have never been repaid, and for centuries, people accepted that since education was scarce. With the rise of technology and the fall of billable hours, is profitability alone enough motive for the world to maintain its current trajectory.

For starters, at this point in time, there is not enough work to command 40 hours/week from every single person on the planet. While labor exploitation continues to exist, the only reason it continues is that if employers were truly willing to pay enough people to do every job on the planet, there would not be nearly enough work to do. We are all being called lazy because employers are cheap, and they would rather accuse than run systems that make sure everyone is employed and has time for a life outside work.

Moreover, if everyone has the opportunity to get any kind of job they want–qualifications notwithstanding because no, everyone is not going to turn into a content creator–then employers lose leverage. Having power over people is how the current labor market is organized, and nothing has prompted the overseers to examine the long-term consequences of such a mindset. This is why, despite decades of proof that workers with reasonable incomes are less volatile and have the capacity to make business owners extremely rich, the “elites” have worked to hoard resources. It makes no sense, but neither do they.

Bleating the word “profit” has created the most horrendous behavior the planet has seen for the last two decades–longer than that, but only recently have more people been made aware of it. The idea that profitability could have been acquired through fair competition, decent wages, and reasonable environmental behavior is lost on many. If, in fact, profit were the only metric to determine what makes a thriving economy, it apparently was not seen as enough, which is why things are as unequal as they are.