Smart people and profit motive have made world a better place

By David McElroy · November 16, 2016

I ordered a camera lens Monday night on Amazon.com. It was a pretty standard order. It’s not an expensive item. I didn’t pay a nickel extra for shipping. It’s pretty routine.

But this order reminds me how much our lives have improved — and how much we take those improvements for granted.

I got a shipment notification for the lens Wednesday morning. I had no idea where it was coming from. I didn’t care. But when I clicked a button in my email to track the FedEx package, a light bulb went off for me.

On the tracking page, I noticed the package was picked up by FedEx in Seongnam-si, South Korea — which is a satellite city near Seoul — at the end of the Wednesday business day there. Somehow, it will be delivered to me in Birmingham on Thursday.

An untold number of people are involved in getting my routine order fulfilled from the other side of the world all the way to me — and I never had to give a second thought to how any of it happens.

It’s a modern form of magic we call logistics.

How did it happen that this system exists — a system that gives me exactly what I want when I want it without any effort from me?

Did FedEx founder Fred Smith have me in mind when he dreamed up the idea for overnight delivery around the country? Of course not.

Did the various pioneers of the tech industry care about a transportation company’s need to communicate instantly around the world? No way.

Did the people who dreamed up the planes and trucks used to bring my package think about me? Nope.

These smart people were motivated by their own needs and desires. Some wanted the excitement of invention, but most wanted the personal profit that comes to those who meet the needs of others in a free market.

Fred Smith’s crazy idea for a package delivery company was a back-up plan after the U.S. Federal Reserve system declined to contract with him to haul checks and other banking documents around the country. It was a crazy idea. Few people gave him any chance of being successful. In desperation, he once gambled in Las Vegas to find immediate cash to keep going. He even had to keep his planes in the air at one point to stop them from being seized in Memphis by creditors.

But he and thousands of other eventual employees found a way to make it work. Early investors in the company took huge risks and then later investors took increasingly smaller risks. Eventually, we started taking overnight delivery for granted.

And now, we take quick delivery from anywhere in the world for granted — from FedEx and its various competitors.

None of these people went into business to make sure I got a lens from Korea quickly this week. They didn’t know I existed. They didn’t know I would ever want a lens right now.

They all wanted to make their own lives better through profit.

Some people today believe profit is a dirty word — they call it “greed” — but the profit motive is what has given us the advances that have made our lives so much better.

(It’s true that the technical foundations of the Internet were laid through research paid for by the U.S. government. I believe the same innovations would have happened without government involvement, but I don’t want to get sidetracked on that point.)

When you see planes in the air and big trucks on the road and thunderous diesel engines on train tracks, remember that all of this has been fueled by the desire of wealthy people to make a profit and smart people with ideas to get rich.

The combination of ideas and capital have brought us amazing things. They’ve brought us millions of jobs. They’ve brought us a luxurious lifestyle. They’ve brought us an insanely great selection of goods and services from around the world. All because “greedy” people wanted to make a buck — and change the world.

I’ll be happy to get my lens quickly all the way from Korea, but it would never have happened without brilliant and wealthy people guided by the desire to make a profit.

Economic freedom makes everybody better off. Profit drives the engine of prosperity.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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