How much profit should one make before it becomes immoral?

Question

If one were to sell a product with a portion of the benefits going to charity, how much profit would be considered reasonable?

Answer 1

If you are billing as a charity and filing your tax as a charity %10 of the money gathered has to actually get to charity.

Answer 2

Any amount of profit is reasonable and moral.  Unless there's significant barriers to entry in the market you deal in it's not like you have a monopoly.  If you charge too much a competitor will enter.  If you have a first mover advantage by being the first to do something, getting rich motivates other entreprenuers to do their thing.  That's the essence of capitalism.  There is no obligation to engage in philanthropy.  Most people just want to when they are no longer concerned solely with business matters.  It would actually make the marketplace work less efficiently to take away the 'getting rich' element by demanding portions of proceeds go to charity.  Which would hurt everybody.

Answer 3

My opinion (and it is simply opinion) is that no set amount of profit is unreasonable, if people are willing to work for the wage you offer, and if it is life saving the majority of people have access to it (Entertainment i think can be morally acceptable with giagantic profits) then there isn't really a problem. If you're asking about how much profit you should put on a charitable product you really need to ask people like you're doing here. I think that 10% of the purchase price going to a charity would be acceptable, regardless of the profit being made by the firm.

Answer 4

Wrong question...  Immorality is not about how much money you make, but about HOW you make money.  If you're a petty crook, you're still a crook, even if you're having problems paying rent.  If you're J.K. Rowling, your money, however many billions it is, is well deserved, because you have created something that brought heaps of sheer joy to millions of people.  But then, there's Bill Gates and all the gray areas... :)

Answer 5

The word "immoral" is a relative term, and has no place as a measure of "profits". Profits from an economic entity, be it a person, corporation, or government, stem from productivity and an innovative business model.

It is a slippery slope for a society to allow any collective, be it government or any other powerful group, to press their own morality on the operations of a free person or a company in a free society.

That said, it has become apparent in our country that our idealistic "free markets" have been morphed into a criminal crony-capitalistic version. Alas, in reality we will ultimately arrive at either the extreme of socialism (from each according to the means to each according to their needs) or Corporate Statism (fascism). We are bound by our natures in the end, all econ books aside.

Check this out if you haven't seen it yet...

Freedom to Fascism

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=...