Where do profitable businesses come from?

[Boojatta]

If a needy person establishes a business, then should consumers be required to buy enough from that business to make the business profitable enough to provide for the needs of the needy founder?

If a needy person establishes a business, then should workers be required to work for that business at low enough wages to provide for the needs of the needy founder?

[cloudbase]

1. No, and no.

Profitable businesses are the result of hard work and the providing of a superior product or service at a fair price.*





















*None of that stuff applies if you've made the appropriate political donations and you are the recipient of a government contract or subsidy.

[Make7]

2. 1. Collect underpants

2. ?
3. Profit

[Boojatta]

3. Link to a related thread

Question: Where does profit come from?

Of course, it's possible to earn a profit without founding a business. For example, one might use one's savings to buy securities that are listed on a stock exchange.

[mrreowwr_kittty]

4. If that business is called Halliburton, then yes. nt

[stillcool]

5. from the book ..

"The Rich and the Super-Rich" by Ferdinand Lundberg available for free download from the following site:http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/0303socialcriticism.html

The Failure System

In business, under the American system, each year the failures exceed the new successes by a very, very, very wide margin. In business, under the American system, hundreds of thousands more have failed, generation after generation, than the few who have succeeded. If we are to judge by the preponderance of individual successes over failures or vice versa, then the American system, businesswise, is a record of steady, almost unrelieved failure. It has failure literally built into it. It is indeed a near-miracle, front page news, when anyone really makes it. This judicious observation sounds paradoxical only because it contradicts conventional propaganda.

As it is observed by Professor Paul A. Samuelson of M.I.T. in his standard textbook, Economics (McGraw-Hill, N.Y., 7th edition, 1967, p. 76), the average life expectancy of an American business is six (6) years!

While it is true that no particular blame attaches to anyone for the high rate of small business mortality, blame can be leveled for the misleading propaganda about the business system. By the one-sided stressing by propaganda organs of the few successes, many are led to lose their hard-earned savings in establishing new businesses. Sound advice to 85 to 95 per cent of Americans contemplating opening their own businesses would, in the light of the facts, simply be: "Don't."

The belief of a wide public that it can succeed in business supplies a lucrative crop of suckers for established equipment suppliers, usually big corporations. Banks, too, participate in this merry game by making loans against resalable equipment. The same fixtures are sold and resold to a long string of losers incited into action by florid accounts of success in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and other media.

Today, the new man going into business, like the individual consumer, does not realize that all the possibilities in almost every situation have been determined down to decimal places by batteries of computers and the results have been evaluated by staffs of exceedingly acute experts. In pitting himself against these computers and highly paid experts, the ordinary man is very much like an amateur chess player who elects to pit his skill against a consulting collection of chess masters. His doom is virtually sealed with his very first move.

Fortune's valedictory for its inspiring group of minor successes was that "The new rich symbolize the abundant health of the U.S. economy, for they have been pushed up by a general prosperity below. A fair guess is that money in the hands of millions at the base will keep them at the summit and in the decade ahead swell their number by the thousands."

[upi402]

7. What should I say to...

...those that proclaims how America is a golden land of opportunity?

[stillcool]

8. I don't know..

in many cases it is. Or was. I've known people who have come here and worked their asses off to send money home, or saved every cent so they could go home and live with some luxuries. I think that there is a mis-conception about what is considered wealthy in this country, and those that are truly wealthy in this country. And it's the gap between the top and the bottom, or even the top, and what I might consider the top. People are successful, and build up businesses that last for generations..but they aren't 'wealthy', like the DuPont's or the Melon-Scaife clan.

[upi402]

9. Good point

When I travel I find a new-found entrepreneurial zeal. I get home and hustle. After getting beat down by the forces against me, I realize this is not the land of opportunity.
True, there aren't social casts nor oppressive, restrictive social mores, but you can't just set up a table on the sidewalk and sell stuff.

Once I had an invention and pursued it. Now I know better.

The disparity in relative wealth is just that. In other countries people get massages, have their clothes washed, and don't shop and cook so much. They make much less but it costs MUCH less to live. If we lose a job here, we're behind and on our way to the street. A cold street too, usually.

When immigrants send extra money home it IS a lot, relatively. It's the same as retiring to a 3rd world country and having retirement funds go MUCH further.

It just seems much easier for working classes in countries I've visited to venture into entrprenurialism, at least as vendors.

[upi402]

6. hogs in our tax dollars trough

Cronies and the neocons who love them.