Profit or Society?

I want to talk about the profit motive, because despite being the cornerstone of capitalism it is highly misunderstood. All sorts of proclamations about the profit motive's success as a social and economic model are published in the media daily. Other causes for social and economic conditions are often avoided, and where profit has a clear negative bias, it is generally de-emphasized.

The profit motive is a simple form of the incentive model. Incentives are conditions in a system which reward or punish different kinds of behavior. Profits refer to one subset of incentives: those which resolve in positive or negative changes to net worth. Needless to say, human incentives are more complicated than this, and strictly for-profit business models still need to account for more different changes which may not be clearly linked to positive or negative account balances. But the capitalist system tends toward this model of profit, and incentives processes are typically explained in this way as well.

May Day 2011: If They Tell You You Can't, Then You Can

Today, I got a chance to momentarily leave my armchair and rise up with my fellow discontents. May Day 2011 saw a motley crew of 300-500 core Richmond leftists hit the streets. There was much ado about the police this time around: namely, the police claimed that protection had to be purchased, and the organizers had to foot the bill. The ACLU even got involved, ineffectively. By the time the rally came about, it seemed like we were already fighting for a lost cause, despite how little the permit meant.

 "I couldn't help but wonder: would we have gotten better turnout if we had been campaigning for fly-fishing somehow?"

It was the same message, the same tactics, the same speakers. A few things were new, but they were scant in today's message. The open-source speaking program policy looks good on paper (and is probably the best way to keep from pissing people off when their pet group doesn't get 5 minutes). But just about everybody seemed ready to skip most of the speakers and hit the streets.