Related: cost, price, usury Profit = Price - Cost Profit means "to progress" in Latin, but that would require it be treated as an investment from the user that pays it. Profit is "price above cost". It is the pressure that causes consumers to pay more for berries than it cost the owners to produce them. Profit requires real or artificial rivalry. Profit is the portion of Price, Rent, Tax or Interest that goes beyond real costs. That profit becomes usury unless it is treated as an investment from the consumer who paid it. Profit is an inverse measure of competition and a direct measure of monopoly. Profit should be interpreted as a plea for development because it measures consumer dependence. Usury gained against consumers disrespects their natural desire to grow, so hampers true progress. Worker wages are a valid cost of production, but workers are consumers too, and taking advantage of consumer vulnerability steps on the undeveloped. Capitalist owners compete against other owners to keep consumer price above production costs, but non-owning workers cannot compete directly because they do not have access to the sources of production. While workers might "unite" as Marx suggested to buy some sources (say a plant), they would also soon be usurists if they did not treat profit as consumer investment. Object consumers who own the sources of those objects may hire workers, but profit is undefined since source owners also own the objects of production even before they are created. Why do we pay Exxon so much Profit? Why don't we, the Consumers, just OWN the oil rigs ourselves and pay the Workers the same as they currently receive? It would save us *so much* money. Physical sources such as land, plants, tools, buildings, etc. are held artificially scarce by (often ignorant, so somewhat blameless) profiteers. If the qualified workers could access these sources "at cost", we could build any car we (the consumers) could dream up. If consumers owned the physical sources, they would be in control, and could finally truely demand the most advanced of designs for game consoles, media players, video cards, clothing, food, etc. even when those solutions "ruin the market" for usurists. Without the usual artificial scarcity and externalization required to hold usury in place, the consuming owners would allow every artisan to compete directly against every other artisan to quickly outperform the dinosaurs of proprietary Capitalism - where only owners compete with other owners while consumers and workers have little say. An unfortunate understanding by a prominent economist: "' When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the "social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system", I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life. The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends; that business has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are --- or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously -preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.'" -- Milton Friedman in "Corporate Ethics and Corporate Governance" Chapter entitled "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits" SpringerLink.com/content/m2141pp14981487h