Profit as Theft from the Collective

Stephen Carter makes an observation about how the law — and fundraisers for liberal and Democrat causes — differentiates between entities on the basis of whether they are organized to generate profits:

… What interests me is why exactly fundraisers believe that including the term “for-profit” will raise the ire of their contributors.

The only reasonable interpretation is that the fundraisers believe — or believe that their targets believe — that there is something wrong with profit, that the proprietors of a for-profit firm are less admirable than those who run companies pursuing other goals. True, the various religious universities whose lawsuit challenging Obamacare’s contraception mandate will be before the Supreme Court next year certainly have their critics, but they somehow don’t manage to excite the same degree of disdain as a profit-making firm.

Carter’s hypothesis is that the targets of the fundraising appeals believe that having profit as a motivation is “less noble. Maybe even wicked.”  Glenn Reynolds, for his part, puts his emphasis on the fact that “a company that turns a profit is self-sufficient.”

I wonder if the reason might be even more basic, still.

As a long-distance gift for birthdays and Christmas, my mother used to put money into savings accounts for my children.  My intent, if ever we manage to get beyond merely supporting our lifestyle, is to bring the accounts to where they would have been if she had kept up the practice.  Under recent circumstances, however, the accounts have merely lain fallow since she died, gathering what little interest monetary policy will allow.  Last week, the credit union sent notifications that our lack of activity had flagged the accounts as “abandoned,” and if we failed to send back forms to the bank, the money would be passed along to the government.

Similarly, the Rhode Island legislature just passed and Governor Chafee signed a new law that requires life insurance companies to regularly check death registries to determine if any of their clients have died and then to find their “designated beneficiaries.”  If those people cannot be found, all of the money goes to the state government.

That money could go anywhere.  It could go to charities of the clients’ pre-expressed choice.  It could go to an emergency fund for natural disasters.  Or it could go back into the insurance company’s pool to lower everybody else’s premiums.  Instead, the government is claiming it for its own.

People of a certain frame of mind, one typically supportive of big government, tend to see all property as belonging to everybody.  Inasmuch as they define government as the embodiment of our communal will and tend to pursue policies to ensure that people with different beliefs are gradually excluded from the halls of power, that means that they see all property as theirs, to do with as they deem best.

Therefore, an organization that takes more money than it needs in order to perform its mission is siphoning money away from them.  Being “for profit” is a type of theft, the profits being essentially unclaimed property that ought to have been paid out to customers or remitted to the government as taxes.

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