Not Too Much

[Henry] Ford believed that his Ford Motor Company could be more than just a profit machine. He paid his workers substantially more than the going rate at the time and rewarded customers with yearly price cuts on his Model T cars (their original price of more than $900 was slashed to $440 by 1916). "I do not believe we should make such awful profits in our cars," he is reported to have said. "A reasonable profit is right, but not too much."
~ from The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Power and Profit by Joel Bakan~

Can you imagine the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Halliburton or British Petroleum making such a statement today? The very notion of generating "too much" profit would be scoffed at. In the current scheme of global capitalism, every record high of annual profit merely becomes the springboard for the next record high.

How did we [d]evolve from the measured profit incentive of Henry Ford to the ruthless exploitation of people, the planet and anything else greedy capitalists can chew up and spit out? Surprisingly, Ford unwittingly played a key role in this evolutionary process!

According to Bakan, the Dodge brothers (who later founded Dodge Motors) were initial investors in Ford. They wanted to use Ford dividends to finance their enterprise. Unfortunately, their grand strategy was thwarted when Mr. Ford decided to cancel the dividends by slashing the price of Model Ts.

This move made the Dodge boys hopping mad and so they did what any good American capitalist is prone to do when someone else throws a monkey wrench into the works: They took Henry Ford to court!

Profits belong to the shareholders, they argued, and Ford had no right to give their money away to customers, however good his intentions.

Naturally, the court sided with the Dodge brothers and this decision altered history. From that point on, corporations only are allowed to look out for their best interests and no one else's. Today's corporations have taken this concept to heart and run with it at breakneck speed.

When it comes to the rights of the corporation to generate profits, there can never be too much. This often leaves too little for everyone else, but who cares?