LETTER

Whose planet?

Mr Ryan’s editorial (Whose Planet?) ended up encapsulating his views on the profit motive and greed, which he equates and decrees to be evil. As I see it, however, there’s nothing wrong with profit; it’s simply a measure of one’s success, a road-map for ambition. Greed, as an over-indulgence in such that leads to illness, is a vice. To characterize corporations as conscious evildoers, bent on promoting a “consumerist lifestyle” that uses our basest “desires and appetites” simply to make money, is putting the cart before the horse. Suppliers respond to consumers, not the other way around.

If it’s contemporary lifestyles Mr Ryan disapproves of, if he considers the average consumer so lacking in judgement as to be incapable of telling value from dross, good behaviour from bad, he should say so. I’ll want to read the reactions to that judgemental and paternalistic initiative. To answer a question he poses, of course there would be no mega-corporations, if there were no profits to be made; there wouldn’t be any corporations at all .... except for Crown Corporations. As for the assertion that business wastes what doesn’t produce profit, a better way of looking at it is that they set aside waste, until they discover how it can be used profitably and then bring a new product to market. Legion are the products that are made from what used to be considered waste. 

Let’s stop being so sanctimonious about profit and money. 

Ronald Lefebvre

Aylmer