The Daily Drucker

18 March Morality and Profits

Is there sufficient profit?

Joseph Schumpeter’s “innovator,” with his “creative destruction,” is the only theory so far to explain why there is something we call “profit.” The classical economists very well knew that their theory did not give any rationale for profit. Indeed, in the equilibrium economics of a closed economic system, there is no place for profit, no justification for it, no explanation of it. If profit is, however, a genuine cost, and especially if profit is the only way to maintain jobs and to create new ones, then capitalism becomes again a moral system.

The weakness on moral grounds of the profit incentive enabled Karl Marx at once to condemn the capitalist as wicked and immoral and assert ...