The concept of profit takes a lot of abuse from the Left. Democrats usually spit the word out as though it were a curse, especially when they’re working to increase government control over private industry. Our current economic malaise illustrate that, contrary to liberal rhetoric, the absence of profit does not lead to “shared wealth” or “economic justice.” A world without profit is a world of poverty.
What, exactly, is “profit?” Technically, it’s income minus expenses. This does not provide a complete understanding of the concept, however. If you’re one of the many people who lined up to buy a new iPhone last week, you can appreciate how the retailer made a profit – he paid a certain amount to purchase his inventory of iPhones, added in his overhead costs, and sold it to you for a few dollars more. His supplier made a profit from him in the same manner, in a chain of commerce which extends all the way back to the manufacturer.
However, it could be said that you also profited from this transaction. You acquired a device you could not possibly have built yourself, in exchange for the earnings from a few hours of your labor. You value this device more than the other things you could have bought with the money you paid for it. Your job allowed you to efficiently convert some of your time into the money you used to make the purchase. Every voluntary transaction produces a mutual increase in value – both parties benefit, or they would not perform the transaction. The dealer wanted your money, and you wanted that iPhone.
How did you earn the money you used to buy the iPhone? You most likely traded some hours of your labor to your employer, in exchange for a paycheck. Once again, both parties made a profit. You might view your job as an unpleasant necessity – feel free to hum a few bars of “I Owe, I Owe, So Off To Work I Go.” In truth, there are other ways you could use your time to take care of basic survival needs. You might be able to find an easier job that pays less. At the extreme, you could live in the wilderness, hunting and foraging for food. Your job is not the only way you can survive… it is the most efficient use of your time, and it generates the most value for other people.
To put it another way, you want to maximize the profit you earn by selling your labor. This naturally leads you to produce the maximum added value to the economy. Millions of people engaged in this quest generate a staggering amount of value, beyond what would be created if they merely attended to their basic needs in a primitive fashion. The voluntary exchange of this value, through mutually beneficial transactions, produces fabulous wealth.
We Americans are swimming in a sea of profit. The depth of that sea is measured in time. Profits are not earned all at once. You (and your parents) probably invested a good deal of time and money acquiring an education, to increase the value of your time. If you’re young, you might not have achieved a net profit on that investment yet. Some people never do.
Companies suffer immense losses on their way to realizing future profits. Apple spent a lot of money designing and creating those iPhones, and success was not guaranteed – in fact, they’re selling well ahead of expectations. An even more dramatic example is the pharmaceutical industry, where billions are spent researching drugs that might require years to reach the market. Some of those investments are lost on drugs that never go on sale at all. Once pharmaceuticals are put on sale, there’s no guarantee they’ll generate big sales numbers. Success at the corporate level requires the ability to calculate risk, and it is driven by the anticipation of profit. No corporation bases its business plan on the money it thinks it will spend and earn today.
I doubt most people appreciate how much our standard of living depends on the exhilarating anticipation of huge profits. The pursuit of profit is a high-octane fuel, pumping through a turbocharged economic engine. It leads to the development of miraculous products, such as the iPhone, which in turn create new opportunities for investment and earnings.
When businesses and individuals believe their opportunities for future profit are restricted, or likely to be seized by the government, they become unwilling to incur short-term expenses. What happens to the supply of medical care, when young people realize grueling years spent at expensive medical schools will lead to tightly controlled salaries and punishing tax rates? What company will accept the risk of selling health insurance when their already thin profit margins are virtually erased by mandates and regulations? Why suffer the immediate costs of hiring and training new employees, when the forecast for future revenue is grim?
It is important to understand that our economy functions at such a high level that relatively small reductions of incentive can unleash tremendous shock waves, the way small twists of the wheel produce dramatic turns for a car traveling at high speeds. It is also important to realize the wealthy investors who drive business formation can always put their money in safer investments with lower rates of return. They take big gambles when they see big prizes. We need a lot of rich people wagering high stakes to generate the kind of prosperity we have enjoyed for generations. Instead, they’re looking at the shelf of shabby carnival prizes offered by our increasingly socialized economy, and leaving the table with money in their wallets. They can live comfortably on modest rates of safe interest from their vast fortunes. They don’t have to hire you, or supply capital for your business ventures.
The same forces influence the behavior of individual white and blue-collar workers. Rising taxes, increasing minimum wages, and expensive mandates like ObamaCare price entry-level jobs out of the market. Lavish welfare benefits lead those at the lower end of the job market to see insufficient profit in taking those entry-level jobs. Waves of government stimulus, subsidy, and price controls destroy the ability to forecast future sales and earnings. No one chases a profit they cannot see clearly.
In the end, there are only three reasons people do anything difficult: desire, ambition, or compulsion. The number of people willing to perform extremely challenging work because they truly enjoy it, or answer a spiritual calling, is insufficient to provide for the vital needs of a huge industrialized nation. That means ambition can only be replaced by compulsion. The work product of compulsion doesn’t have anywhere near the value created by free people, in the pursuit of their ambitions. The difference is between a prosperous society filled with stores selling technological miracles, and the grey communal existence of long lines for mediocre goods furnished by the State. That difference will be measured in the barren wasteland where the middle class used to be. As Francisco d’Anconia puts it, in a famous passage from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged:
Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns–or dollars. Take your choice–there is no other–and your time is running out.
I choose dollars, joyously and without reservation. Those who demand you choose otherwise will lead you into a World Without Profit, where you have very few other choices to make.
Cross-posted at Hot Air.
Oh how I wish I could append something of value to this work.
There’s a funny thing about money.
Consider a farmer, with the standard forty acres and a mule. If he plants twenty of those and harvests for his own need, he is unlikely to incur the disapproval of the social busy-body. If he plants the other twenty acres and again uses the bounty for his own purpose, few would accuse him of greed. If he trades the produce of those twenty acres for the labor of farmhands or a measure of lumber, all is well. It is only when he seeks to exchange his excess harvest for money that he raises the eyebrow of the pious.
Money is exteremly useful, because it is versatile. It is a “store of value.” It is a representation of wealth, a convenient medium of exchange. Imagine a fishing village in which there is no money, only bartering when a person having one commodity at a particular time must find someone in need of it at that moment and who is willing to engage in a trade. Assume there is a fisherman, a carpenter and blacksmith. The fisherman returns with a load of fish. He needs the services of the carpenter who currently has enough fish. The blacksmith would like some fish, but the fisherman has no smithing needs. In the absence of a medium of exchange, the fish rot and the carpenter and blacksmith sit idle. With a medium of exchange, the fisherman sells the fish to the blacksmith, takes the money to the carpenter who provides the desired services and saves the money received as a store of value until he needs it for something else.
What is useful about money, and what gives it the reputation as the root of all evil, is that money can be turned into just about anything, vice as well as virtue, evil as well as good. What is particularly distressing to the unthinking moralist is that money can be turned into power, and thus people who have a lot of it are potentially threatening. Money can be turned into abortions as well as organized opposition to abortion. It can be turned into nuclear powerplants and be pilfered by green energy scam artists. It can buy ad time on the television as well as political favors from unscrupulous cads. It can be used to subsidize innovative technologies or to assemble monoplies that will squelch such innovation.
For these reasons some people are suspicious of the motives of those with money. Obama rails against fat cat bankers, not because he is against money, but because he is afraid of what people who do not think like him will spend it on. Money is both good and bad; good because this innovation allows us to have more than a hunter-gatherer or prehistoric bartering economy, and bad because it can be used in the service of bad character and stupid programs. This is why money that is earned by hardworking enterpreneurs is suspect, until it is sanctified by being transferred through taxes to a government that is much more likely to turn it into something useless and unpleasant.
If I may, here are some previous thoughts on profit and risk:
All of the current fashion regarding “spreading the wealth,” “redistribution,” and the notably gaseous “economic justice” overlooks one unavoidable truth: Human progress involves risks. The economic corrollary to this is that people who take risks that produce benfits to others should be compensated for doing so. This latter concept is not merely a principle of fundamental fairness, it is a pragmatic necessity as well. Why would anyone take fruitless risks, risks for which the rewards are subject to confiscation in the name of political ideology?
These facts give rise to two distinct types of wealth: that which requires someone to run risks to create, and that which does not. A redistributist may have an argument that it is not legitimate for a person to simply harvest resources that should be available to everyone, and amass a great fortune as a result. Compensating others, or the community in general for supplying the infrastructure, etc. to make such wealth possible seems reasonable. However, when a drug company risks millions to develop a drug which might never reach the market , or a venture capitalist supports the developer of some obscure technology that might benefit a great many people, or might lead to loss of the investment, those risk-takers should be entitled to retain the bounty of their risks. We seem to have realized this concept previously; we tax capital gains at a lower rate, and we allow patent protection to inventors. Conversely, we prescribe criminal sanctions for insider traders, who seek to capitalize on low risk transactions at the expense of innocent investors.
“Spreading the wealth” of someone who comes by such wealth as a result of political connections, exploitation of public resources or disproportionate depletion of common resources is far different than confiscating the legitimate gains of someone who through diligence and foresight profited where he might also have come away with nothing at all.
It is approporiate to compensate people for assuming risks, because risks are necessary to progress. There is very definable economic component to risk. People expect to be compensated for assuming risk, and conversely are willing to pay to reduce their exposure to it, as through insurance. Many state retirement funds are in trouble because they foolishly releived retires of all risk associated with changed economic conditions. Chrysler bondholders, who assumed the risk of of future insolvency to provide working capital to the corporation were shafted so that risk of failure would not be borne by the UAW.
It is possible to generalize the philosophies of right and left with reference to how they view risk. The left views risk as an evil to be evaded at all costs. No one should have to risk their own assets on account of health; kindergarteners should be given condoms (although they will still be labeled sex offenders if they hug a classmate); drilling in the gulf must be stopped until it can be proven to be 100% safe; lawn darts, vaccines, DDT, credit card debt, salt in food, bake sales, etc., etc. are not worth the risk. The right on the other hand recognizes the inevitability of risk, and relies on the God-given means to accommodate it: what used to be called common sense.
RE: The left views risk as an evil to be evaded at all costs.
Risk that they wish to avoid, that the left pushes off onto someone else. (Gaming the system). The left hires security forces rather than the risk of defending themselves. They write laws, to their benefit. They avoid defending the nation, and mock those who volunteer to do so. They mock as fools those who do take on risk via investing, declare any reward for that risk as ‘unearned income’ or evil speculation.
Then they wrap themselves in the cloak of altruism and mock those who profess religious faith when their idea of altruism is scoring grant money used to pay their high priced salary.
z9z99, are you and Doc Z genetic twins? Except for your use of the idiom “shafted”, you have identical (excellent!) styles.
Excellent sir, as usual. But you will have no choice. The grey pall of socialism descends. We must struggle against this, but to be realistic, this society must hit bottom before it can learn. That bottom will be unbelievably bad. Long before it is reached, government will have silenced voices like yours, which will only re-emerge underground in the far distant revolution.
[...] Zero posts at his own blog, and cross-posts at Hot Air) Doctor Zero, Economics, Educational [...]
You need to suffer from some kind of spiritual disorder to hate profit. because it is only a just reward for those who have managed to make themselves helpful to others. Greed is often portrayed as a moral disease, as if healthy greed could not possibly exist. Attributing moral deficiencies to others is only an attempt to hide one’s own shortcomings.
If we do a good job of raising children, we encourage them to channel their own greed and ambitions in constructive ways, by being better educated and more understanding and appreciative of the needs of others. Why are we doing this? Only because we wish our children to be happy! In other words, we would like their existence to be meaningful, productive, and therefore, profitable. Profitable to whom? To their own children. Seeking profit amounts to an expression of faith in the future. Profit never comes right away. It is a delayed gratification, a testimony to the human capacity of contemplating the future.
Is it really a coincidence if the most prosperous societies are also the most optimistic?
Big government and bad journalism is exactly the wrong prescription for a healthy America. The Socialist have been pushing for this for years and now they have the right people running this country to achieve their goal, the destruction of capitalism. Of coarse they will destroy the country in their endeavor.
In an economic sense you define “profit” wrongly as the difference in cost and price. This is the accounting definition which has only a cursory relation to economics. Profit is the “motivation” for a transaction. That’s all it is. No motivation, not transaction. Since both parties of a transaction must get off the couch to transact, there is motivation on both sides and thus profit on both sides of a transaction. All humans value things differently so that a standard price is a very crude measure of profit for a transaction, but a necessary one due to the reality of mass markets.
http://hindenblog1.blogspot.com/2010/06/crash-marvel-of-markets-v-insanity-of.html
There is only one thing required in the Gulf…government, out of the way.
The market…driven by the profit motive…has people lined up to solve the problem.
The sole impediment IS government.
Years ago when I worked in NYC, someone had scrawled on a building near the one where I worked “Human need BEFORE profit.” Every so often, I’ve pondered what that bit of self-congratulating nonsense might have meant. Does it mean every human need should be satisfied before anyone is allowed to make a profit? If so, no one will ever make a profit and NO human need will ever be satisfied, for no one will ever be paid a salary (yes, salary IS a profit for the worker!) The rational worker will rightly see it is better to be needy and be satisfied on that basis than to work and have to wait until everyone else’s human needs are satsified and he can profit. So workers will abandon work in droves and join the ranks of the needy. But one can see at some level this reaches a tipping point (like our number of tax-paying citizens today?) and the number of needy is so great they can never be supported by the number of remaining workers.
“Human need BEFORE profit!” Probably made him feel good to write it but it would be hell if he had to live it.
BOF: I think you and I could agree, best put, it is “Profit SATISFIES Human Need.”
The left truly does not understand “Econ101″.
My left-wing stepfather responded identically to the Coal Mine disaster earlier this year and the Oil Disaster in the gulf: “All in the name of the Almighty Dollar.” As if the ‘Almighty Dollar’ was some product of evil gotten gain. He apparently doesn’t remember this as he fills his gas tanks or flips on his light switch.
The left will demand harsh penalties (some may be justified) and massive taxation on these industries as a whole in a knee-jerk response to these disasters. Obama will be more than happy to ‘kick some ass’ in a heavy handed way. Then as fuel prices skyrocket and oil companies shift their sales to other regions as many industries already have, the left will respond with blaming the industries once again.
Ironically, if this were the 1800′s, I could picture the first black president and the power brokers in Washington advocating slavery as a care-free status of employment, pointing to food and housing being provided and job security as an added bonus!
Excellence in essay writing again, Doc! I certainly profited from reading your efforts, and you then gain from readers such as myself spreading the wisdom from your words.
With proper credit, of course.
@ Greg Vincent:
Oh, so true, since “Socialist” states like France, Sweden, and the former USSR eliminated the use of currency… oh, wait. Strike that.
@ cntrlfrk:
The notion of the dollar is not evil unto itself … as z9z99 so eloquently put it: “[...] money can be turned into just about anything, vice as well as virtue, evil as well as good.” It is when a company like BP uses their money to pay off inspectors in lieu of mandated improvements and safety mechanisms–all in the name of maximizing stock dividends–that frustrates the consumer and perpetuates the cliche regarding the inherent evil of money. Your stepfather is right: Mr. Hayward of BP was praying at the “evil” altar of profit.
@DOne:
No, my stepfather is still an idiot, not unlike leftist trolls.
The disconnect that suggests if profit did not exist, this accident would not have happened is like suggesting if gun ownership were against the law, then nobody would be killed with a gun.
The same goes with the leftist canard that oil is inherently evil because so much revenue flows to the industry.
@ cntrlfrk:
See … this proves my contention that an intelligent discourse will never occur on a conservative blog. Please go back and notice my preface and learn to read. Money is not evil, nor is profit. Profit at the expense of safety and responsible management is. How dare you “troll” me, sir. F**k you and your safe, secure, insulated world, f**knuts.
Go ahead and ban me, Zero … your entourage is elevating my blood pressure.
The author of this article has been plagiarised. Please see http://www.ubersite.com/m/125566
Ubersite wrote:
Thanks for the heads-up! It looks like they’ve got proper attribution sorted out over there, and resumed their anger-management group therapy.
DOne wrote:
If that was meant as Pythonesque self-parody, it was absolutely brilliant. “I’ll never be able to have intelligent discourse with you f**knuts!”
I think I trembled on the edge of such blind anger after my readership grew large enough to bring in my first load of weapons-grade hate mail. If you got this angry over the relatively mild rebuke from cntrlfrk, my inbox would give you a coronary. I made an early decision never to take any of it personally, or allow myself to become distracted from the topic at hand. There is no reason to do so. You’re sitting at a computer, in the comfort of your home, with plenty of time to consider your responses, not screaming in somebody’s face down at the local watering hole. Exasperation does not reflect well upon your capacity for reason.
I’ve read your response to Greg Vincent a couple of times, and I still can’t see how what you said has anything to do with what he said. If your idea of “intelligent discourse” is swinging at straw men and waiting for a round of applause, you’re unlikely to find any satisfaction in these quarters.
As to the exchange with cntrlfrk, the original point made about Cntrlfrk’s Stepfather is very much in line with the subject of my essay. Blaming all sorts of ills on the “almighty dollar” is a pointless, indeed counterproductive, waste of energy from people who obviously haven’t thought very hard about the alternative of the “almighty state.”
Your original response to cntrlfrk is as self-refuting as the “f**knuts” outburst. You were correct in saying the notion of profit is not evil, but you ended up with BP’s Hayward (no relation, by the way) praying at the evil altar of profit. Certainly the uses to which profit is put must be judged according to the standards of law and morality – not even the most ardent capitalist thinks a company should be able to use its profits for hiring assassins to take out competing CEOs.
Likewise, the pursuit of profit is an entirely separate consideration from responsible business practices and obedience to the law. It has long been a contention of mine that corruption is a supply-side problem: if government officials have power and indulgence to sell, as was clearly the case between Obama and BP, there will never be a shortage of buyers. A small government, tightly focused on its *duties* and given little surplus power to sell, is the best way to minimize corruption. Simple laws, evenly enforced, are the best mechanism for informing a company what it is *not* permitted to do in the quest to maximize dividends.
Let me put it to you this way: do you imagine the collectivist society our President is attempting to build, with overwhelming regulation of business and confiscatory taxation of profit, will be LESS corrupt?
I hope you are up to the challenge of engaging in discourse without any more “f**cknuts” trash talk, or Twittering insults at me, because so far my only banning was prompted by someone trying to post Nazi propaganda in my comments, and I’d hate to think you want to run in such company.
Gordon Gekko had it right that greed is indeed good. Not of the rapacious sort, but rather in the vein of drinking every possible oz of the nectar of life we can get our hands on….
As usual Doc is spot on in that profit is the medium through which we are all best able to achieve the most good most efficiently. If you’re not sure, once you’ve finished Doc Zero: Year One, pick up a copy of Harold Evan’s “They Made America” which is a collection of stories about the 200 most influential inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs in the United States since our founding. One read and you’ll recognize this fundamental truth: The United States has done more for the advancement of the human condition than any other nation in the history of mankind. It’s no coincidence that guys like Cyrus McCormick, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Thomas Watson, Sam Walton, Ray Kroc, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Marc Andreessen, and Mark Zuckerberg succeeded in the United States.
Profit is simply the most unambiguous measure yet devised that lets people compare what it is that they have to what they want. The United States, with it’s free markets and rule of law (as long as it lasts…) is the best venue (of consequence as Singapore is a little on the tiny side…) on the planet for harnessing that profit motive to facilitate the greatest amount of benefits for the greatest number of people.
It’s funny, I thought I was reading intelligent discourse before DOne showed up. Apparently, he has a talent for bringing out the worst in commenters.
While I would be the first to admit it is easy to get caught up in the banter of the blogosphere and shoot off a rant without a clear head at times, I don’t think I was off on my classifying “DOone” as a random ‘troll’ with no intention of initiating or participating in any form of intelligent discussion.
I will give him credit for at least making an attempt to pull his head out of the echo chamber of KOS and Humpingpost.
The left may claim there is nothing bad about good ol’ fashioned profit, but they seem to have at a minimum, a deep seated success-phobia as they threatened Windfall Profits Taxes on the oil companies not long ago, included bonus and pay limitations and profit margin limitations in Financial and ‘Health Care’ Legislation, not to mention saddling business owners with an up and coming Carbon Tax, while promising to not renew the Bush Tax Cuts, all the while threatening to punish the successful with the burden of paying for bloated, out of control government.
Incentivizing Mediocrity, and punishing success. What could go wrong?
@ Doctor Zero:
Doc,
A reasoned response that I appreciate, yet still woven with the same presuppositions that warranted my outburst. I delivered a reasoned argument–contending that you are, in essence, absolutely right, but the argument needed to be qualified with the painful fact that profit, at the expense of responsibility, is evil. In response, I was called an “idiot troll” by someone who knows nothing about me. I responded in a hyperbolic version of his own response to me. Despite this, he continues to assert my idiocy (giving me left-handed props) and you, who does know me, stands firmly in his corner because he agrees with your ideology.
I will always contend that some (relatively few, really) companies will always pursue profit at the expense of humanity. Ask yourselves to be objective and moderate and admit that this condition is evil.
Btw … Congrats on your book. Hope you sell a million of ‘em.
@ cntrlfrk:
Not a Kos or Huffington fan, Mr. Ad Hominem. All things in moderation, friend.
@ Mike from Stumptown:
Clever. Now I will troll. Your contributions are most appreciated.
DOne wrote:
Thanks for the congratulations! I’m marginally short of a million sales at the moment, but then again, the day ain’t over yet.
Conservative web sites have a lot of problems with trolls. There was a notorious effort by political consultants to send paid trolls to hassle right-wing forums, leading to the creation of an exciting new troll sub-species, the “concern troll.” These were people who would announce they were lifelong church-going, meat-eating, Reagan-loving, NASCAR-crazy conservatives who Just Had Too Many Questions about McCain and Palin. There are still a lot of attempts to introduce straw men and hijack threads on the big conservative sites – some of the big threads on Hot Air turn into Thunderdome after a hundred posts or so. Consequently, I think conservative posters looking for a good discussion are very sensitive to trolling.
I’m sure the same thing happens on lefty sites, but it doesn’t seem as widespread. (I occasionally go dumpster diving by searching for my name at some of them. I get called a lot worse than “concern troll.” I cherish the rare witty putdown, but they’re usually pretty lowbrow.) Maybe part of the reason is that the big liberal sites police their forums and ruthlessly purge comments they don’t like, while very few of the conservative sites do so.
I didn’t want to seem thin-skinned earlier, but you should know the correct term of opprobrium for conservatives, according to the Washington Post, is “ratf**kers.” “F**knuts” are totally different. I think it’s a little insensitive to f**knuts to go around confusing them with ratf**kers.
On the topic of those evil businesses you mentioned: I would suggest that every sector of a society, from the poorest to the richest – and most definitely including members of the government – has its share of lawbreakers. When the laws are especially complex, as is the case at the highest levels of Big Business, there are a lot of thin legal barriers an ambitious corporation might find itself pushing against. The government most definitely has a role to play in enforcing laws at all levels, but I maintain only a Spartan government equipped with exceptionally simple and clear laws has a fair chance of performing this duty efficiently and impartially. Remember “The Parable of the Referee?” When the government grows beyond a certain size, it’s only a matter of time before the referees begin tackling players and running touchdowns.
@ Doctor Zero:
I whole-heartedly agree. I do not entertain the notion that government could do as well (or poorly) a job at being responsible in industry. In fact, I’d probably argue that–given no “check” to corruption–government would prove more corrupt in a corp[orate enterprise. I do not believe in Socialism (in its purest form); I do, however, believe that government exists to police and punish transgressors in the arena of responsible practice.
Our Founding Fathers believed in checks and balances, and, without government regulation, some of the more volatile industries (like energy) will create disaster after disaster, with no checks in place to prevent these occurrences. I believe that government is necessary to the general welfare.
This being said, I realize and chastise government for its involvement and facilitation of the Gulf disaster. This is your point exactly, which I am very aware: Government can be an is as self-motivated as “big” industry.
I am proud to hear about your sales numbers. You are one of the most eloquent writers out here, and I hope that you double that current number.
Gratz!
@ Doctor Zero:
Doc,
Can you expand upon your assertion that there are only three reasons people do anything difficult; desire, ambition, or compulsion?
Thanks.
@ DOne:
“uses their money to pay off inspectors in lieu of mandated improvements and safety mechanisms” – Mandated, interesting
“without government regulations ome of the more volatile industries (like energy) will create disaster after disaster” – Regulations?
Sir, you ARE a troll. Hillbuzz does a very good job teaching ‘troll-spotting’ 101, and your mock “I agree with most everything, except” camouflage is wholly inadequate to disguise your hostility to free market capitalism, IE, people trading as free men without governmental coercion. Your insistence that abitrary bureaucrats must “mandate” and “regulate” all transactions is flawed at its root. Your stipulation of energy companies needing it because of their ‘volatility’ is completely illogical, and is derived from a flawed premise. The more complex or volatile a market is the LESS it needs any sort of governmental interference, as those systems are irreducibly complex and only the invisible hand can operate them, not the heavy hand of govenmental force.
That is the entire point of this article, that free men trade, and in doing so CREATE wealth. Whenever any non-producer offers to monitor the flow of that wealth to ensure ‘volatility concerns’ or fairness, or whatever trite justification he thinks can allow a bit of that wealth to stick to his own fingers, he takes away a bit of the incentive to create that wealth. It is kinda like a siphon. Once started it will run for a long time, but if messed with the wrong way, the flow of liquid will stop, and the entire process must be repeated. Government must stop playing games with the discharge end of the siphon.