Economic Nonsense: 46. Profit is a sign of exploitation

No.  Profit is the reward for investment.  An investor defers gratification and uses their money instead to try to make more money later.  Profit is the compensation he or she receives for doing this.  Part of it takes account of risk, the risk that the investment might not pay off or that the investor might lose the money they put up.  Part of the profit is reward for taking that risk.

The notion of profit as exploitation derives from a mistake made by Karl Marx.  He supposed that value resides in objects, rather than in the mind of the beholder.  Because he thought it resides in objects, he asked how it got there, and answered that value represents the labour it takes to make something.  A price charged above the value of that labour represents "surplus value," and is exploiting the workers who make the object.  Hence comes the notion of profit as exploitation.

In fact people value things differently, which is why they trade.  An object's value to me might represent the other uses I might have made of the money, had I not expended it in producing the object.  If someone values it more than that they will pay a price that includes a profit for me.  Far from being a sign of exploitation, profit serves a valuable human purpose in motivating people to produce goods and services that are of value to their fellow human beings.  It directs us to serve the needs of others in seeking a return for ourselves.  The butcher, the brewer and the baker might seek their own reward in terms of the profit they make, but in doing so they provide others with meat, ale and bread.

Profit is legitimate, and sends signals to others.  If some areas of production show high profits, others are motivated to enter that field themselves and bring extra production onto the market.  The competition with other producers will generally act to restrain or reduce the high profits.

Miliband's attack on profit is an attack on patients

Either Ed Miliband is struggling to understand the basics or his ideology is spiralling out of control. The latest Labour pledge:

Labour would cap the amount of profit private firms can make from the NHS, Ed Miliband will say as he launches the party's election campaign.

He will pledge to halt the "drive to privatisation" he claims has taken place in the health service since 2010.

The future of the NHS is "on the ballot paper" and only Labour can guarantee the funding it needs, he will say.

Under his plans, private firms will have to reimburse the NHS if they exceed a 5% profit cap on contracts.

Companies make profit by keeping costs as low as possible while producing a product or service that people want (and ideally choose) to consume. Apologies for the simplicity, but apparently Ed needs it.

Pledging to fix levels of profit that a company can make ruins any motivation for the company to bring costs down. Given the NHS’s current financial situation, Miliband should not be so quick to toss aside the importance of efficiency gains.

Nor should he be ignorant of private firm’s impacts on patient outcomes.

Private firms are hardly private when working for the NHS; they are still under the jurisdiction of NHS bureaucracy and are often dependent on public funds for their operations. But where private firms and independent sector treatment centres do differ from the public sector is in their record on patient outcomes. Research from 2011 showed that ISTC surgery patients are healthier and experience less severe recovery conditions than patients undergoing the same surgeries with NHS providers.

Furthermore, Circle's management of Hitchingbrooke Hospital turned a failing trust into one of the highest ranked hospitals for patient happiness and cut waiting times drastically; their recent failings were not a result of bad healthcare but rather bad business.

One of the reasons Circle reneged on its government contract is because it’s a struggle to make efficiency gains under NHS regulations as they currently exist; if Labour gets its way, this will become nearly impossible.

Miliband's attack on privatization and profit is an ideological attack on buzzwords; unfortunately, his crackdown could have real affects on patient outcomes.