Is It Theft or Smart Business?
What is a man if he is not a thief who openly charges as much as he can for the goods he sells?
~~ Mahatma Gandhi ~~ (1869 - 1948)
Now that is a good question to ponder.
Just because you can charge for something as much as you want and people will pay for it because they don’t have a choice, doesn’t make it a smart business. Rather, it displays a pickpocket mentality; steal as much as you can while you can!
A classic example happening right now is in the crude oil business. It costs approximately $2 to produce a barrel of crude oil in Saudi Arabia and $15 in Alberta, Canada; yet, at the moment, oil is trading over $120 a barrel! How come?
Now everybody will agree that to survive and prosper, a business has to make a reasonable profit - the keyword being ‘reasonable’. To charge $120 for something that costs $2 or $15 to produce cannot be called reasonable by any stretch of the imagination! Of course the price of oil is not determined solely by the producers; there are many other players like the oil companies, traders, speculators etc. etc. - just fancy names for pickpockets! And they would have us believe that it’s all a question of supply and demand! Or which has become even more fashionable now-a-days: Blame everything on the emerging economies of India or China or both. :-)
If all these players in the oil industry were to limit their profits to a reasonable level, the price of oil will certainly not be what it is today. Gandhi would call it theft, not business. I agree.
Browse all Mahatma Gandhi quotes
Leave a comment