> Easily - it’s like saying “Consuming food is a necessary condition for human life”. That doesn’t mean all human activity reduces to eating food. Similarly, i

> Easily - it’s like saying “Consuming food is a necessary condition for human life”. That doesn’t mean all human activity reduces to eating food. Similarly, if you build a machine to assist humans in consuming food you don't say the point of the machine is something other than assisting them in consuming food. > But the elephant in the room is that if profit were the only motive, nobody would bother to start businesses in fields that aren’t very profitable. The fact that they do, is an existence proof that people run businesses for reasons other than profit maximization. Right, but that seems to be missing the point. Which is that the business itself, seperate from the personal goals of the owners and employees, as an entity, has to attempt to maximise profit [because of the economic system it exists within] to enable the goals of the owners and employees. And further to that, if (and I've never said that it isn't an if) that becomes a driving factor, it subsumes the personal goals. For a business to grow to the level talked about, maximising profit has to be the driving force. Edit: > This is just affirming the consequent again, making the assumption that these business all have maximizing profit as their primary goal and that the only reason they haven’t grown giant is constraints. Nono, these businesses are giant. They have grown giant, that's what this was all primarily regarding.