While Free Is Unjust, Profit Is A Moral Imperative – OpEd
Western culture has made a cult of “gratuitousness” and, consequently, condemns what is not free as sinful as well as commerce and the desire for profit. And all this is against nature -human-, against the order of the cosmos so that it has no solution, man has no solution would say the “humanists” who pretend that everything is free when what has no solution is the hypothesis they put forward because it is contrary to the truth, ergo, to the good.
In a video of Natureisspeaking.com, with the voice of Julia Roberts, “Mother Nature” assures that “I am already more than 4500 million years old, I am ready to evolve, I do not need humans, but they need me, no matter what man does, if he follows me he evolves with me otherwise he is destroyed”. Clearly the idea is to respect nature and follow it and not try to divert it with human arrogance.
This “Mother” plans to give what is necessary for life, or put the other way around, if she did not plan to give humanity what is necessary, we would have already disappeared, and I would not be writing what is true today. Nature has planned that the most basic things will be accessible to everyone, starting with air, oxygen, which is within easy reach and so accessible to everyone, so “offered” that, in principle, it is free. Then, with food it seems that it is not the same, however, it is as we will see.
So, to avoid it, it is important to see how humans stop following nature and that happens with the use of violence that the Greeks, like Aristotle, already defined, precisely, as the extrinsic force that aims to divert the intrinsic -spontaneous- natural development of life, for example, the force that aims to divert the will and development of the person. Ergo, it is equivalent to taking away freedom. And, since the State arrogates itself the monopoly of violence, it seems that it is the main subject that imposes a deviation from the natural path.
Thus, a natural market – the set of all the inhabitants of a place – is a market “free” of violence, which develops spontaneously, intrinsically by its own forces and powers without any third party violently trying to divert its development.
And so, unemployment is non-existent since work abounds as it is the creation of goods and services from nothing, that is, you can always find something to create if no one coercively prohibits it. For example, consider the enormous deficit that humanity has in all aspects, from food to housing, hospitals to build, etc., much to be done. Unemployment appears, precisely, when the State imposes a minimum wage leaving unemployed, those who would earn less, the poorest, the neediest.
Without unemployment, everyone has income, and then prices appear, which are the arbiter between money in the hands of the market and needs and desires. The more necessary a product is, the greater the willingness to pay for it and so prices rise and then production increases, although the price is not infinite, it cannot rise more than the money that is on the market.
Now, it turns out that the world produces enough food for the entire global population, the 8.2 billion human beings, and still more than enough for 3 billion more. It is logical, nature, infinitely wise and long before man, produces them in abundance.
Why are food is not available to everyone, why it is not free and easily accessible. Because they it is physically heavier, ergo, it does do not distribute itself like air, but needs to be transported, needs transport work and that has a cost, ergo, it will have a price beyond the cost of production that depends on each food, although there are even free ones such as those that grow naturally without human intervention.
So, according to the supply and demand curve, if the total food is overabundant, its average price should be very low if not zero or, even more, perhaps we should be paid to collect the leftovers since they can be a storage hindrance. The fundamental cost – and then the price – I insist, is a cost of logistics, collection and transportation.
But if in a natural market everyone has a job, two things could happen. First, the most credible, that the salary is enough to buy food, otherwise no one would work since they would end up dying of starvation. But if it was not enough, as it is a transportation problem, people would migrate to places close to production until the salary is enough to buy them.
So, if there is hunger today, it is due to three reasons, because people do not have work, because the salary is not enough and/or because they cannot move to the vicinity of production. These three cases, as we have seen, do not occur naturally, but something extrinsic is interfering with natural development. And that extrinsic is the violence exercised by the State that causes various injustices, that is, forces society to stop following, distances man from Mother Nature in various ways.
By imposing taxes that lower wages and make products and their transportation more expensive. Taxes that fall more heavily on the poorest since, the higher the economic capacity of a person, the more the tax burdens are lowered, for example, businessmen pay them by raising prices, making products more expensive for the poorest.
Then the State is expected to provide free food, which, ironically, is a great injustice because it is not free – since it has a cost – but is paid for with those taxes that fall more heavily on the neediest. In other words, the poor are deprived of money with which the salaries of the state bureaucrats are paid plus some percentage that is always “lost” along the way and, with what is left over which is less than what the poor contributed, they return “free” food.
Hence, what is disastrous, what is destructive is not the State spending that could eventually be solved with the sale of the almost infinite State properties, but the tax collection that takes resources away from the market, especially from the poor, to return less than they contributed.
Another way in which the State creates hunger is with unemployment, with labor laws, such as the minimum wage, that prevent those who would earn less from working as we said. And finally, causing serious difficulties to logistics and transportation and with borders and other obstacles that prevent the free migration of people to places where their salary is enough to buy food.
To conclude, let us make it clear that work, commerce and the necessary desire for profit (created and desired by “mother nature” as a healthy motivation to improve in service to the customer, to others) are the instruments of the natural order for man to cooperate, peacefully and in community, in creation. In a natural market, where nothing is acquired by force, money can only be earned by attracting customers, that is, by providing them with better service, or, in other words, by making those who provide better service earn more money; hence the virtue of the desire for profit.
