Blessed are the Profit Makers
by Angelo Moscarello
© 2011
We’ve learned well about the “Job Creators,” those well-heeled individuals who alone can afford to build the factories, create the jobs, and provide a living for the populace. In compensation for their financing, planning, and marketing strategy, they bank the profits. Yet, despite the logic, the profits do not come from their commercial brain trust. And that pot of gold that bankrolls a new factory is not found at the end of a corporate rainbow. Profit, as well as capital, comes from the daily suffered labor of the workers. They are the Profit Makers, those that sew the clothes; assemble the automobiles; pump out the oil from the ocean floor; build the houses; dig up the coal from the bowels of the earth; forge the tools used to build the machines that run society; sell the goods and services produced; and tend to the sick and feeble who no longer can work. The coffers of the wealthy estate would never overflow merely by the toil of their own hands. Those who command the boardroom could not also drive the delivery truck. The Profit Makers live as a single organism, producing all the life-giving sustenance needed to thrive well, but are restricted by external forces to only a portion of its intake. Machines can increase production, even replace labor, but they are born from the hands of labor.
The great technical genius would pocket little more than a pittance if his or her beloved innovation weren’t duplicated a million times over, filling the shelves at the Wal-Mart Super Store. The garage/workshop of those romantic early days would turn into a wearisome spider hole where they would face a lifetime of indentured servitude to that grand idea.
Some Profit Makers are self-sufficient; the doctors, house painters, artists, photographers, lawyers, street vendors, exercise trainers and the like. Yet, most “professionals” depend on assistants to perform their work or on the manufacture of requisite tools and equipment. Also, they would have their profits limited by their physical presence and energy level. At the end of a hard day, the street merchant would not be going home to Xanadu. Some millionaire talk show hosts believe they are emblematic of the entrepreneurial spirit; however, their remuneration originates from sponsors who employ millions of people to produce the millions of products their listenership purchases.
Without the salaries of the Profit Makers capital would be tightly budgeted. Bank vaults would be half empty, or half full, according to how you look at it, holding only those deposits made by the self-employed artisans and professionals. How many transactions would pass over the counters at the banks if manned only by CEOs and Boards of Directors? And how long would those deposits remain in the vault if the more infamous “entrepreneurs” of society were allowed to ride out of town with the spoils of their trade unfettered by police? And law enforcement depends on a lucrative society.
Will ever the Profit Makers receive a fair sized basket of the fruits of their labor? It won’t be soon. Yet, they provide the profits that create the banks that finance new factories that hire the millions of hands that make more profits that end up in the banks. Labor makes the world go round. So, Blessed are the Profit Makers, for they shall inherit the earth.
