The purpose of business is a good topic. I here suggest a provocative way to look at the purpose of business.
What's the purpose of a business? We ask a profound question here. A goal could be money. Are businesses just for money--? ~just for profit? The most interesting thing in the previous is, arguably, where I say, “for.” What is a business FOR? When we try to explain a business simply by citing the money -- and of course there is some connection -- we see that this is not what they are FOR, particularly. That is not the thrust of it. There is this money connection, of course, but this is not all of it. What they are for is something else. We could, for example, claim that when
businesses make money that makes for a great society, or we could say it provides jobs and so forth. We could even try saying that having a job gives people something meaningful to do in their life. Which emphasizes meaning and not money.
So, is it
better to just say businesses are there to make money?
There is a need for a person in
our society to make money. It seems fundamental; there is something fundamental here. These can be called money motives. After
all, we always see this, especially in any urban society. That everybody in that kind of society needs
money is something we can say with a reasonable (i.e. for social science) degree of confidence. A suggestion that business has other characteristics might be met by hostility, on the part of those who run business enterprises. Actually, banks would make up the special case of "only after money."
DO persons in our society work hard? If it
is a small business, it probably involves an individual working hard all day – for
as the common wisdom would have it, the sole proprietor tends to be a hard worker.
If a big business, then there are other considerations. It may therefore be
that “just making money” is too narrow an explanation of why businesses exist. It is not satisfactory to say that some businesses are only there for the money. It doubt any are.
This is our repeat question: Are businesses there just for money? If the individual wants, actually needs, money, and businesses are run by these same individuals, are businesses simply
the functional translation of that need? Once we understand the foregoing, there is a further consideration. Given that the goal of all the businesses together cannot be money, if there is something that serves as the end or the goal, that involves the free interaction of beings. Such an observation involves necessary conditions for there to be any capitalism at all. In
this connection, I will suggest that capitalism regulates that freedom, rather than the opposite, that it eliminates/removes freedom. The freedom simply may not be removed. That would break the capitalism system in any event. We can say that the system of business forces this necessary human freedom into guidelines, yes. Or it forces the necessary freedom to follow rules. There are certain rules, but the reasonably well-compensated individual lives in a free
society. That is a form of capitalism we can live with. We just said that capitalism needs that freedom, and thus it is
inconsistent to now say that it may go away.
We therefore may conclude
that businesses are not there to get money, nor to make a profit. They are doing
that anyway, but we have no problem adding the consideration that participants have freedom. Once the participants have freedom, they can go ahead and make money. Therefore, the society that results, which is a society with all of this business activity going on in it, involves the free interaction of human beings. Anyone that believes
this to be unimportant probably does not care much about freedom, in any event.
Our process of
inquiry has now taken us out of the tight circle of business being “only for
money” ---- thus we have been able to place ourselves into at least a slightly broader view of the
matter.
This means that: Business actors
are not involved merely in self-interest. They are acting as social beings and perpetuating reasonable society, one that is fair. They are perpetuating a society
that contains, in it, freedom. Somehow it seems to work.
When a person goes
to work, is she “just trying to get money”? Persons often used to say that.
They would tell you: “I am just trying to make a living.” It is time to give up
on that excuse. We need to take seriously the idea that we have
responsibilities to others.
An individual who
is involved, as a free member of a free society, in business, whether as owner
or employee, is not just there to make money and he never was. He us a man, he has honor, and he is there to uphold a responsibility. This responsibility involves upholding a capitalistic social order, a society that may succeed only when it contains, in it, human freedom. How an individual goes about doing the active part of that is his or her own
business, which is not the same as saying it does not need to be done well.
