Profit

What is profit?
When a man enters any productive endeavor he starts with a given sum of capital (unspent wealth). If after a period of time he is left with more than he started, he has earned a profit. If he is left with less then he started, he has incurred a loss.

Isn't the profit motive evil?
No. The profit motive is the pursuit of making a profit from one's production. The opposite is the loss motive -- to pursue a loss. Now tell me, which is evil? Obviously not the first, and only the latter. The pursuit of profit is the moral right to pursue ones happiness applied to the ones economic endeavors.

How is a profit made?
Profit is not made by conning others, but by creating something of value that did not exist before. As wealth is required to support one's life, the increase in wealth through production and trade -- the creation of a profit -- adds to one's life. How can the pursuit of wealth, the support of one's life, be considered evil? In reason, it cannot.

What is not profit?
Stealing wealth from others, through fraud or force, is not profit, but theft (an initiation of force). Whether that theft is called a mugging, welfare, or "voluntary" taxation [a contradiction in terms], it is still theft and is always evil. Theft, like loss, is destruction; trade, like profit, is creation. To pursue profit is to pursue creation. It is an act of virtue and not a vice.

Your profit is the symbol and reward for the value of your creation, as judged by the mind's of others who have freely-given given their wealth to you in exchange for it. Do not let the leftist intellectuals who infect our universities persuade you from thinking otherwise. In truth, it is those altruists who condemn the profit motive, who are guilty of evil.


Suggested Reading: 

See Francisco's Money Speech in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (pages 410-415 HB).