If we could just remind - profit is value added

This strikes us as wrong:

For decades, films out of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios have opened with Leo the roaring lion, garlanded with the motto ars gratia artis: art for art’s sake. Given that MGM is a money-making behemoth, we might doubt the sincerity of this high-minded sentiment. Still, it certainly expresses one of the few legitimate reasons why people should make movies. Art for the sake of anything else – profit, self-promotion, propaganda – isn’t really art at all, or at least not in its purest sense.

Profit is the value added in an activity. Here’s the value of the resources used to make it. Here’s the value of it having been made. Profit is the excess of the second over the first.

We’re wholly willing to agree that the value of good art is very much greater than the costs of its creation. That statue of David is worth very much more than a hunk of rock and innumerable mashed thumbs. We’re also going to insist that the value of bad art is very much less than the cost of a plate spinner and some paint.

But still with this insistence - profit is value add. The aim and purpose of all activity is to produce value add, a profit.

That more common usage of the word profit, that part of the value add that the capitalist gets to keep, is a special case, a subset of the whole. It really is true that the whole aim of everything is profit. Whether we’ve capitalists involved or not.

Tim Worstall