Profits? An Operational Definition Appreciation

In considering an acceptable operational definition of profit, one should consider a primary and secondary question. Firstly, what kind of world do you want to live in--one with more and better time for all or one in which people have less and less time to be quality human beings? Secondly, do you want to live in a word in which words have definite universal meanings or "whatever" situational meanings?

If your answer to the first question is the second option then you don't realize how the decline of quality time leads to problems that will eventually invade your life by the crime lottery--link. If your answer is wanting all to have a better time then how you answer the second question is very important. If we do not seek to have honest, definite and universal meanings to our our words then we have institutional infrastructural lying. With lying from semantic slippage, we will suffer more problems longer and harder as the definitions of and prescriptions for the problems do not fit the problems. Problems waste time. Everyday a problem is unsolved is a day of lost time.

The role of lost time from problems is especially important in the operational definition of the word profit which comes from the Latin "pro esse." Literally, honestly and originally, pro esse means forward existence or forward time. If you want a better world, how we define profit will affect whether people put their time into solving real or imagined problems.

Of profit, do you want to define in real time or paper time? The old cliche, time is money and money is time is only true if one has an honest, functional currency that is tied to the value of work time. If one has a dysfunctional, divorced currency then the true saying is that time is money and money is lost time. With inflation, the workers holding the money lose the worktime that the money symbolizes. In considering financial reform, what are the chances of lasting success if the guiding principle is paper time instead of real time?

Related to the real or paper time definition of profit is an understanding of inflation so as to eliminate the inevitable economic and political chaos and collapse from unstopped inflation. Do you want inflation defined as a cheapening of paper time or real time. If policy-makers focus on preventing the cheapening of paper time then we will see an increase of real time cheapening and suffering.

The fix is in. The tenured economists and habitual politicians will keep focusing on paper time because it is easier to get money in less time by playing with paper than by working with problems. A long-standing criticism of economists summarizes the focus of policy-makers on symbols over substance: Economists know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

We will have less and less till we have nothing because we are dishonest in our analysis of our problems. Everyone wants something for nothing. Lying to ourselves and others gives our egos the facade of well-being that will not last. We are not moralists in the morality of more time but are, more or less, losers in the immorality of less time.