Ryan Daniel Moran and John Mackey argue that profit motive and entrepreneurship solve most world problems better than government or nonprofits. Mackey splits social tasks into three buckets: profitable ones the private sector handles, those requiring nonprofits, and large-scale needs like defense that need government. Technology shifts tasks between buckets, generally toward privatized solutions.
I believe that entrepreneurship and capitalism is the best way to solve just about every problem in the world. I get plenty of pushback against this point from people who disagree. I wish that those who disagreed could have a healthy and respectful debate about the conversation. I truly believe that we all agree that we want to solve world problems, right? We want people to be healthy, we want people to be wealthy. We don't want people to be discriminated against. I wish we could just start the conversation. There's, there's problems in this world that we need to solve. What's the best way to solve them? I believe that in almost 100% of cases it is through the profit motive that we can best solve those challenges that face us. That's why I think we need more entrepreneurship. That's why we need less government. That's why we need freer markets. So I asked John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods and the author of Conscious Capitalism. What he said was what he thought was the role of government, especially in today's world. And here's what he had to say.
Anything that you can make a profit doing belongs in the private sector. Because you're going to have entrepreneurs who are going to create innovative solutions and are going to make progress. Things that business can't make money doing. They're social problems. Let's say I'm on the board of the Humane Society of the United States, for example. They can't make money doing what they're doing. They're helping dogs and seals and cats and livestock animals. They can't make money doing that. So things that you can't make a profit at belong in the private. I mean in the private sector. But in the non profit world, however, there are certain things that the nonprofit world can't deal with either. There are global environmental issues. There are things you need rules in the society, you need laws, you need police, you need defense. There are things that neither the private sector, nor the capitalistic sector, nor the nonprofit sector are equipped to deal with. That's government's job. It's a huge job. If they would just stick to that and do it well and let business do what it does well, and let the nonprofit sector do what it does well. We will be living in a virtual utopia.
So I thought it was interesting that John broke it into basically three groups. If something can be solved profitably, it should be done from government. If something can't be done profitably, it should be done through a non profit. And if it's too big for either of those, the that it should be addressed by government. I mostly agree with this. One thing that we didn't have time to go into is that that changes new technology and new opportunities make it possible for the profit motive to solve certain problems or for a nonprofit to take over what a government could only previously do. Now it can be taken out of government and put into the nonprofit sector. So we didn't talk about that. But if we assume that's true, which I think we all agree, technology makes things easier and faster. Right? And it opens up more opportunities. Well, if that is true, then we should be seeing less government and progressively less nonprofits and then more into the for profit sector, the private sector. But we tend to see the opposite because most people don't think that way. The tendency tends to be for more government, for people to say, why do we need the profit motive in this? Why can't we have a non profit do this? Why can't we have the government do this so it's more fair and equitable? Well, the reason for that is because things are sustainable when they're done via the profit motive. So the best way that we can progressively make the world a better place is to, if the government needs to be involved in something, have them solve the challenge to the best they can, which isn't gonna be very good until a non profit can take that over. Until the profit motive is there to solve that problem. That, in my opinion, is how we can progressively make changes that better our world and sustainably do that through the profit motive. Because that is how we ultimately will solve all of the world's problems.
Sam.
