Social responsibility not possible without profits

Money and morality, said Marwood, go hand-in-hand; business cannot be successful without both. “This is not a choice of one or the other,” he added. Marwood’s comments carried added weight with the business leaders present. He was one of the recipients of the 2007 National Human Resources Development Innoprizes, which are bestowed on 12 companies and six individuals every year by Taiwan’s Executive Yuan. The prizes recognize innovation in HR practices.

The profit motive is a moral imperative for success and economic well-being, emphasized Marwood. “It is the life blood of business, the very means for survival.” Long-term profitability, he added, requires “decency, trust, honesty, fair-dealing and quality goods.” It is precisely, he said, the quest for profit that gives consumers cheaper, safer and better products. “For a private business in a free economy, there is no such thing as obscene profits, only obscene losses.”

If that is the case, Marwood questioned why so many believe that the profit motive is evil. “Why,” he asked, “is business routinely denounced on TV and in the movies with the businessperson always portrayed as the villain?”

He listed a number of problems, which he said, are unfairly blamed on business. These include obesity (fast-food franchises), political corruption (special interest groups), personal bankruptcy (greedy credit card companies), declining moral standards (movie studios), lung cancer (evil tobacco companies) and murder (gun manufacturers).

It is unfair, he said, that businesses are deemed guilty until proven innocent. “The anti-business mentality simply assumes that the charges are true, making a presumption of guilt because it sees the primary motive of business-the pursuit of profit-as evil.”

He cited Sarbanes-Oxley legislation and anti-trust actions as prime examples of this tendency. “Sarbanes-Oxley was passed in an anti-business frenzy following the exposure of fraud at Enron and WorldCom. The problem is that it targets all business, not just the guilty; it further presumes that all businesses are fraudulent until they prove that they are not guilty.”

In his view, anti-trust laws serve only one basic purpose-to prevent a company from getting too good and to help second-rate organizations free-load off the best and not be shut out of markets created by the best.

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