That is not the meaning of profit. Wages, in fact, are an expense to the employer and an asset to the employee. Profit is money that accrues to a single entity that has borne both the investment and the return. If you want to speak of profit in prison, then you would speak of the guy who has accumulated cigarettes in exchange for blow jobs or other favors. But inasmuch as that economy is even more restrictive than the larger economy that feeds it, it is so far removed from the notion of freedom as for that reference to be absurd.
People are not free unless they may peacefully and honestly pursue their own happiness in their own way. Freedom is the absence of coercion.
Liberal: * Profit is money that accrues to a single entity that has borne both the investment and the return. […] People are not free unless they may peacefully and honestly pursue their own happiness in their own way. Freedom is the absence of coercion.*
I’ve got no problem with any of that (although of course you and I would disagree somewhat on what constitutes “coercion”, but that’s not important right now). But when I put it together with your comment from a few posts ago—
I’m saying that people are fine so long as they can make a profit. It means they’re free.
—what I think I come up with is that you’re saying that people who are earning wages instead of making profits are not free. In which case the vast majority of Americans, being wage-earners rather than business owners, are not in fact free people.
In which case we’d be in worse shape even than the most fanatical extremist terrorists say we are. We’d be worse off in terms of genuine freedom even than India, the majority of whose population are still subsistence and small-cash-crop farmers (albeit very poor ones) rather than salary earners, which by this reasoning would make them more free than middle-class American mechanics and bank managers.
This conclusion doesn’t make sense to me, so I think I must be misunderstanding you somewhere.
If you want to speak of profit in prison, then you would speak of the guy who has accumulated cigarettes in exchange for blow jobs or other favors. But inasmuch as that economy is even more restrictive than the larger economy that feeds it, it is so far removed from the notion of freedom as for that reference to be absurd.
Again, this is where I think Aldebaran has a point about the inadequacy of defining freedom in strictly economic terms. It ain’t chiefly the restrictiveness of the economy in prison that makes it seem so “unfree”; it’s the restrictiveness of even more basic aspects of prison life, like being locked in by armed guards, for example. I think that even if prisoners were making boatloads of profit by day-trading or running start-ups over the internet via XDSL connections from their high-security cells, it would be hard to consider them “free” in any really meaningful way.
What I meant was there’s still an element of coercion, when the choices are to work for a miniscule wage or to do absolutely nothing. Work makes the time go faster; sitting in one’s cell makes it go slower.