[Author’s note: This is the title essay of Profit Without Apology: The Need to Stand Up for Business. You can purchase the full book here.]
Key Takeaways
The modern world was built by business: businessmen spearhead human progress by translating knowledge into wealth.
But we live in an anti-business culture that views the pursuit of profits with suspicion.
The root of anti-business sentiment is a corrupt moral code—altruism—which damns self-interest and glorifies need, punishing producers for producing.
In reality, the pursuit of profit is morally good: it is earned by businessmen who pursue their happiness through productive achievement and win/win trade.
To create a pro-business culture, businessmen must stop apologizing and start fighting back.
That is why we created the Atlas Circle: to stand up for business and to provide intellectual ammunition to help business stand up for itself.
Businessmen are guilty of a moral crime. Their crime is not that they’ve manipulated, defrauded, or exploited humanity. As a group, they are responsible for creating the world of abundance that has lifted most of mankind out of poverty and increased lifespans from 30 to 80. No, their crime is that they’ve been too timid, too apologetic, too hesitant to declare that what they do is good.
In a world that treats business as guilty until proven innocent and insists that successful businessmen have a moral obligation to “give something back” (as if they had taken something rather than created something), businessmen have not spoken out in their own defense. They have not said that business is a noble calling, demanding our highest virtues and worthy of our deepest admiration. They have not said that the profit motive fueling their achievements is honorable and that the profits they earn are deserved. They have not insisted on their moral right to freedom from government interference and control.
Instead, businessmen have responded to charges that they are greedy and exploitative with silence—or, worse, by trying to appease their attackers with assurances that their goal is not their own profit but some “social” goal like creating jobs, or paying taxes, or pursuing philanthropy. One way or another, they concede that the core activity of business—seeking profits through the production and trade—is dangerous and immoral, and that the moral high ground belongs to the blowhards trying to shame and shackle them.
“As a group,” Ayn Rand observed in 1971, “businessmen have been withdrawing for decades from the ideological battlefield, . . . Their public policy has consisted in appeasing, compromising and apologizing: appeasing their crudest, loudest antagonists; compromising with any attack, any lie, any insult; apologizing for their own existence.”1
Is it any wonder, then, that the public distrusts business and welcomes the regulatory state? If businessmen themselves will not speak out in their own defense, can the public be blamed for thinking it’s because the critics are right and there is something sordid about the work and fortunes of businessmen?
It’s time that businessmen stop apologizing for their success and start demanding moral recognition for their achievements—and the moral right to their own freedom.
That’s why we created the Atlas Circle: to stand up for business and empower businessmen to stand up for themselves. We believe that the work of business is morally good. We believe that businessmen have been singled out for special attack: they are damned precisely for their virtues. And we believe that only by exposing and repudiating the ideas that fuel anti-business sentiment is it possible for businessmen to gain the recognition and freedom they deserve.
Who Moves the World?
We live in an era of incredible progress. Individuals in the advanced world are living longer, healthier, safer, wealthier lives than at any time in history. Not only has life expectancy at birth nearly tripled since the pre-industrial era, but life expectancy at age 50 has risen between five and 10 years since 1950.2 Deaths from accidents—car accidents, plane crashes, falls, fires, drownings—have all plunged by orders of magnitude over the last century.3 Deaths from climate-related causes, such as drought and storms, have declined by an astonishing 98 percent.4 On the whole, global prosperity has risen from $3 a day in 1600 to $33 a day, with individuals in the freest countries living on $100 a day—a 30-fold increase.5
We take progress for granted, but we shouldn’t. Progress is not a given. For most of history, the bulk of humanity lived at the edge of starvation, and economic growth was measured in centuries, not years. That changed around 1800. Why? Because it was only then, with the birth of capitalism, that a new figure entered the historical scene: the businessman. He sought to profit by constantly finding new and better ways of doing things. Inventors, innovators, and industrialists pioneered technologies and entire industries that transformed every aspect of human life.
The Energy Revolution. Energy empowers human beings to use machines to do our work for us. It was businessmen like Newcomen and Rockefeller who discovered how to produce low-cost energy to power those machines, creating the fossil fuel industry and unleashing dramatic improvements in every other area of human life.
The Transportation Revolution. For most of human history, human beings could travel no faster than a horse. Businessmen created steam ships, locomotives, cars, and airplanes to close the gap between distance and time. Thanks to entrepreneurs and inventors like Vanderbilt, Ford, and the Wright Brothers, we could move goods and ourselves further, faster, and at lower cost.
The Food Revolution. Throughout history, producing food has been mankind’s greatest concern and struggle. But thanks to businessmen, food has never been more abundant, convenient, diverse, or affordable. Because of innovations in agricultural technology, transportation, and refrigeration, fewer agricultural workers than ever grow more food than ever at a lower cost than ever.
The Communication Revolution. Human beings survive by discovering and deploying knowledge. The more knowledge we can access and the faster we can access it, the more we can thrive. A long line of businessmen, from Bell and Edison to Gates and Jobs, brought us the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television, the personal computer, the internet, and the smartphones that have made virtually the whole of human knowledge available to us at the touch of a button.
The Health Revolution. Modern medicine gives us more years in our life and more life in our years. Business supplies our doctors and hospitals with MRI machines, pharmaceutical treatments, life-saving stents, and non-invasive surgery technologies that save and improve lives.
The Financial Revolution. Progress is only possible in a world that runs on money, and the financial industry helps deploy money profitably. Venture capitalists, private equity firms, and community banks help spark new ventures and revive failing ones by matching money and talent. They help us mitigate risk through insurance. They help us maximize our consumption through credit cards and other consumer loans. They help us live securely in retirement through low-cost index funds and financial planning services.
We can point to problems and challenges in all of these industries. Every technology and new line of business introduces new risks and challenges. But car accidents don’t erase the value of cars. Air pollution doesn’t erase the value of low-cost energy. New achievements give rise to new problems for human ingenuity to solve. Progress involves the continual improvement in our ability to meet life’s challenges, including the challenges progress itself creates.
But at every step, the individuals driving human life forward are businessmen. Businessmen prosper by translating knowledge into wealth. The sciences expand the frontiers of knowledge, but it is businessmen who figure out how to use that knowledge profitably, how to create the products and services that we use to pursue our happiness. Scientists study energy—businessmen produce the power that runs our factories, farms, homes, and cars. Scientists study diseases—businessmen produce the instruments and drugs that cure disease and improve our quality of life. The businessman, Rand concludes,
is the great liberator who, in the short span of a century and a half, has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries—and in which most of it still lives, in non-capitalist countries.6
Value creation is primarily intellectual, and here businessmen make an unmatched contribution. Their intellectual labor determines whether a worker produces ten outfits a day or ten thousand—a pencil or a computer—snake oil or a life-saving pharmaceutical. It is businessmen who introduce new products, new services, new tools, new methods of production. It is businessmen who formulate business strategies, and pivot when those strategies fail. It is businessmen who decide who to hire, who to fire, what prices to charge, and how a product should be sold. It is businessmen who risk their life savings and work for years without pay, with nothing but their conviction that the doubters are wrong and that success is possible. All of that takes thought, judgment, and courage. And it is through that intellectual effort that businessmen supply us with the knowledge, resources, and processes that lift our productive power to increasingly greater heights.
If you knew nothing else but that business drives progress, you would assume that it was the most heralded, celebrated profession on earth. The reality is far different.
Our Anti-Business Culture
We live in an anti-business culture. While we will sometimes celebrate top businessmen for their achievements, we nevertheless view them with an air of suspicion and categorically deny them any moral recognition for their work.
Even our most successful, most respected business leaders are told they have a moral duty to “give something back.” We do not chastise successful scientists, artists, athletes, or even literal lottery winners about “giving back.” But to succeed at business is to “take something from society,” in Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff’s words, and the solution is for businessmen to “truly give back and have a positive impact.”7
This is actually the least negative way successful businessmen are described. The nineteenth-century industrialists who created the modern world were unjustly denounced as “robber barons” and “lords of industry,” equating them with the unproductive, oppressive aristocracy that ruled the feudal ages. Today, we condemn Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Auto, Big Ag, and any other successful business as greedy and exploitative. To be “Big,” i.e., successful, is to be bad. According to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars. . . . You sat on a couch while thousands of people were paid modern-day slave wages.”8
Tarred as greedy and exploitative, businessmen become convenient scapegoats for every problem or crisis. Who took the blame for the Great Depression? Businessmen. Who took the blame for spiraling healthcare costs? Businessmen. Who took the blame for the 2008 financial crisis? Businessmen. Who took the blame for our recent bout of post-COVID “greedflation”? Businessmen. And despite the reality that each of these crises was caused, not by business, but by anti-capitalist government policy, the scapegoating was used to justify handing even more power to the government.9 “The greed of Wall Street and corporate America is destroying the very fabric of our nation,” claims Sen. Bernie Sanders. “[I]f Wall Street does not end its greed, we will end it for them.”10
The result of this anti-business rhetoric is an oppressive regulatory state that restricts the freedom of business to build, to innovate, and to profit. Federal regulations take up more than 90,000 pages, with government controls dictating in unimaginable detail how businessmen are permitted to function. Major building projects that took months a century ago now take years to complete (if they can be completed) solely because of regulations like NEPA and Certificate of Need laws that treat business activity as guilty until proven innocent. And a resurgence in antitrust lawsuits by both Democratic and Republican administrations has threatened our most successful companies precisely because they are successful.11
Why We Hate Business
Why is our culture so hostile to business? It’s not fundamentally because of any actual wrongs or misdeeds. The reason we evade the achievements of business and vilify businessmen is because we’ve been taught that their driving motive is dangerous and immoral. “Who on earth,” asks conservative luminary Irving Kristol, “wants to live in a society in which all—or even a majority—of one’s fellow citizens are fully engaged in the hot pursuit of money, the single-minded pursuit of material self-interest?”12 You can’t trust businessmen for the same reason you can’t trust a gangster: he’s after money and is willing to do anything and harm anyone in order to get it.
This is utter nonsense. And to see that it’s nonsense, ask yourself this question: Why does anyone bother to work? Why does a farmer grow corn or a novelist spend hours a day carefully crafting a story? In short: to make a profit and earn a living.
Human life requires material values, and those values aren’t provided ready-made by nature—we have to create them. This is true of our most basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter. But it’s true of every value that sustains and enhances our lives. We work in order to eat—and to travel to a friend’s wedding, to listen to a soul-nourishing symphony, to spend an afternoon with our children at the zoo. Production is the fuel that powers all of our endeavors, and the proof of successful production is that we have created something more valuable than what we used up, i.e., we have profited.
This is why work itself is so often rewarding. Whether it’s a child building a block tower or an architect building a skyscraper or an entrepreneur building a company, there is something deeply fulfilling about exercising the thought and effort necessary to create new values.
The reason that we work, then, is because we value our own lives and our own happiness. To earn a living is an act of self-interest. We seek work that we find rewarding so that we have the material resources to build thriving, joyful lives.
The same is true for businessmen. They seek to earn a living by creating values—and the insignia of value creation in business is monetary profit. To create profits is to build something more valuable. Loss is a signal of destruction. An unproductive employee gets fired. An unproductive businessman goes bankrupt. If you are doing something morally good when you earn a paycheck as a doctor or software developer, then a businessman is doing something morally good when he earns a profit by creating a great business.
Is the problem “too much” profit? There’s no such thing. Profits don’t come at anyone’s expense. They aren’t taken from workers or customers. They aren’t taken at all. They are earned through countless win/win transactions. An author grows rich because millions of readers value the book more than its cost. A businessman grows rich because thousands or millions or billions of customers value his product more than it cost him to produce it. The greater his profits, the greater the value he has created.
What ensures that a businessman can profit only through creating value rather than through manipulation or exploitation? Freedom. In a truly free society, a businessman cannot force anyone to work for him or to buy from him. Nor can he run to government for favors. His only currency is the opportunities he can offer to others: jobs they want, products they desire, services that enhance their lives. If a business won’t pay me what I think I’m worth, I look for another job (or start my own business). If a company charges me too much or offers me too little, I take my business elsewhere. When people are free, all trade relationships are voluntary, and we only pursue them to the extent they are mutually rewarding.
It is only when people resort to force that someone can profit at another’s expense. When an executive defrauds customers he is acting as a thief. When a CEO grows rich on corporate welfare or protectionist tariffs, he is extracting benefits he could not achieve on a free market. But to the extent a society is free, the only path to long-term profitability is virtue: the exercise of rational thought and productive effort necessary to prosper through voluntary trade.
For anyone who values human progress, who recognizes the moral right of each person to grow, thrive, and prosper, who believes that the pursuit of happiness is the individual’s noblest quest, then the profit motive represents something good: it is a businessman’s desire to earn a living. To build the kind of life he wants to live and the kind of world he wants to live in. To live by his own thought and effort, dealing with others through mutual consent to mutual advantage.
But this is not what we have been taught. The reason we condemn the profit motive is because for more than 2,000 years we have embraced a moral theory that does not hold the individual’s pursuit of happiness as its goal but selfless service to others. Altruism, the moral doctrine that says our duty is to serve something “greater” than ourselves, teaches us that the profit motive must be immoral because its aim is not self-sacrifice but self-interest. From the New Testament’s condemnation of those who concern themselves with worldly riches—to Marx’s condemnation of profit as exploitation—-to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s warning that “[t]he profit motive . . . encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition”13 -to Fed chief Alan Greenspan blaming the “self-interest” of businessmen for a crisis he helped manufacture,14 we have been indoctrinated with a moral view that teaches us to view businessmen with suspicion at best and hatred at worst.
Altruism distorts our evaluation of business in two basic ways. First, it teaches us that need, not achievement, is what entitles a person to values. The economist Thomas Sowell once observed, “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”15 The answer, Rand understood, is embedded in the logic of altruism. The morality of altruism allows you to collect sacrifices and gain values—provided you don’t earn them. If you’re a producer, you don’t have a right to what you produce. That’s greedy. But if you produce nothing? That is precisely what gives you a moral right to what others produce. According to altruism, Rand observes, “it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the effort of others—it is immoral to consume your own product, but moral to consume the products of others—it is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch—it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself.”16 To earn a fortune is selfish and immoral. To earn nothing is to be granted a moral blank check on those who create abundance.
Second, altruism teaches us that the only alternative to sacrificing yourself to others is to sacrifice others to yourself. Altruism rejects the possibility of living as a self-supporting trader, who forges mutually rewarding relationships with others. Either you value other people, in which case you must serve and sacrifice for their needs, or you callously ignore other people, in which case you reveal a willingness to trample over their welfare and rights in a brute quest for money, fame, and power. This is why altruists refuse to make a moral distinction between a Steve Jobs and a Bernie Madoff, a Sam Walton and an Al Capone.
But a moral theory that can’t distinguish a trader from a thief invalidates itself. A moral theory that casts blame and suspicion on those who create values and legitimizes those who seek to deprive producers of their freedom and their justly earned wealth is deeply unjust. A moral theory that teaches us to condemn the profession that has liberated us from poverty and built a thriving world is suicidal and anti-human.
We need morality. But not the morality of self-sacrifice. “The purpose of morality,” said Rand, “is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”17 We need, in short, a morality of self-esteem.18 One that values each individual’s pursuit of happiness.
Why Businessmen Must Stand Up
Businessmen are an oppressed minority. In any conflict with any group—workers, consumers, politicians—they are assumed to be in the wrong. Whatever the problem or crisis, they are assumed to be at fault. When they are subject to special laws scrutinizing, controlling, and penalizing them in a manner that no one else would tolerate, they are expected to shut up and be thankful for how good they have it.
The persecution of businessmen is overlooked because they are not helpless victims. Their victimization is not the result of lack of political or financial resources but of moral resources. Businessmen are oppressed because they will not stand up for themselves—and they will not stand up for themselves because they accept, or are afraid to challenge, the moral ideal of altruism that dominates our culture.
Altruism paralyzes businessmen. On some level, they know that what they do is good—but they also know that their motive is not the good of others but their own happiness. They know that they are in business because they want to make money doing work they love, not to selflessly serve the needs of others. And so when they encounter arguments that they are achieving “obscene profits” while some people’s needs are going unmet, or when they encounter charges that “the public interest” demands reining in their “unchecked greed,” they feel mystified, helpless, indignant, and vaguely guilty. Behind closed doors, they might complain about the irrationality of the assault on business. Publicly, they remain silent—or degrade themselves by appeasing and apologizing to their attackers. This isn’t merely a practical misstep—it’s moral surrender.
This needs to change. Businessmen should stand up for themselves: for the nobility of their profession and their moral right to freedom. Everyone who benefits from the abundance business has created—which means, everyone—has a responsibility to stand up and speak out for business. But if we are to move from business oppression to business liberation, businessmen must not only play a role—they must lead.
Every great movement for justice in American history has required victims of injustice to stand up and say: I will not accept this any longer. The American colonists declared their independence from a tyrannical crown. Abolitionists—many of them former slaves—refused to let slavery be accepted as a permanent fact. Women fighting for suffrage stood up and demanded political equality. Civil rights leaders took enormous risks to challenge Jim Crow and demand equal treatment under the law. More recently, the gay pride movement succeeded, not by appealing to pity, but by asserting self-worth: we will not be treated this way any longer.19
In every case, these movements succeeded when they were animated by the conviction that they were fighting not for special favors or exceptions, but for justice—for the recognition that they were moral equals, unjustly persecuted, and deserving of freedom.
Businessmen, too, are the victims of injustice. They are the only group in America routinely denounced not for harming others but for succeeding. They are subject to a regulatory regime built on the premise of preventive law—that because they seek profit, they inevitably will do wrong unless subject to surveillance and control. They are presumed guilty before any crime, their freedom preemptively curbed.
And yet, where is the moral outrage? Where are the business leaders declaring: I am not a servant. I do not apologize for my ability. I do not apologize for earning profits. I am a human being, and I demand to be treated as such? Until that happens—until businessmen stand up proudly and defiantly—we will continue to live in an anti-business culture that deprives businessmen of the recognition and freedom they deserve. But if they do stand up, history shows what is possible.
Speaking out against injustice can provoke retaliation—from the media, from political activists, from the government. We in no way mean to minimize the risks. But far more dangerous in the long run are the risks of not speaking out.
That is why we created the Atlas Circle. The Atlas Circle exists to stand up for business—and to help businessmen stand up for themselves. To provide them with the intellectual ammunition they need to defend the value of their work and to fight for justice and for freedom.
The fight for freedom is never easy, and it never has been. But it is winnable—if those with the most to lose also realize that they have the most to gain by speaking out. The battle for capitalism is, above all, a moral battle. And it can only be won when businessmen rediscover their own moral self-esteem—and demand justice.
Don Watkins
Don Watkins is the Vice President of Marketing and Fundraising at the Ayn Rand Institute. He is a bestselling author and a leading voice on the moral case for capitalism and business.
Ayn Rand, “The Moratorium on Brains,” The Ayn Rand Letter
Angus Deaton, The Great Escape, 128.
Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 176–185.
Alex Epstein, Fossil Future, 258–84.
Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity, 55–56.
Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual, 27.
See, for instance, Don Watkins, “The Great Depression and the Role of Government Intervention”; Onkar Ghate, “No Right to ‘Free’ Health Care”; Don Watkins, “Free Markets Didn’t Create the Great Recession”
Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism, 80.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here, 197.
Thomas Sowell, Barbarians inside the Gates, 250.
Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual, 144.
Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual, 123.
For an overview of this moral theory, see Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics.”
Onkar Ghate, “Freedom and the Need for Business to Stand Up for Itself”
A businessman seeking to increase his profits is mainly focused on one thing: how can he make our lives better? This is not an altruistic motive. Far from it. If he can figure out how to better satisfy a need it can give him an edge so he can charge a little more because he delivers an added benefit. Or maybe he figures out a way to satisfy a previously unmet need. Although he is focused on anticipating our interests his motive is and should be entirely selfish. This is not a downside, but a virtue.
That the person we are transacting business with is working for a profit should reassure us, not make us apprehensive or feel endangered. It means he is earning his living by demonstrating to us that his product is worthy of our money. He is at the mercy of our favorable judgment so that we become willing to part with something we value in return for what he produces. We are in control. Profits are earned by trade, which by its very nature does not involve any rights-violating conduct.