profit motive ...

The "profit motive," speaking broadly, means a man's incentive to work in order to gain something for himself — in economic terms, to make money. By Objectivist standards, such a motive, being thoroughly just, is profoundly moral. Socialists used to speak of "production for use" as against "production for profit." What they meant and wanted was: "production by one man for the unearned use of another."
- from Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
_______

As defined by The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy:
- Profit Motive: The ability to earn profits as the reason = for producers to make and sell goods. 1
‡ The profit motive is often called a great good or a great evil in society. On the one hand, it is said to represent selfishness; on the other, it is said to drive the free market system. (See invisible hand.)
_______

Profit defined by Webster:
1 : a valuable return : GAIN
2 : the excess of returns over expenditure in a transaction or series of transactions; especially : the excess of the selling price of goods over their cost
3 : net income usually for a given period of time
4 : the ratio of profit for a given year to the amount of capital invested or to the value of sales
5 : the compensation accruing to entrepreneurs for the assumption of risk in business enterprise as distinguished from wages or rent
_______

Missing from all those definitions is what is in the mind of an Entrepreneur [one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise].

For example, an enterprising young woman recently, in our nation's history, most likely discovered ways to make substantial returns from her investments. She could have accumulated those returns and lived quietly - modestly or perhaps purchased expensive items for herself and family if she chose to do so. Instead, I believe she had a bigger, and maybe better, idea - one possibly similar to my own.

Might be she grew up always wanting to run a business of her own - I do not know, but I believe quite likely she did. I know I did. With her own good mind then, she conceived an idea that would benefit the larger community - the world itself: an autosurf service in which anyone could earn an "unrealistic" (as defined by her own government) rate of return in exchange for performing a few simple tasks each day.

Some bright and well-meaning folks observed the young lady's progress and her not-so-well-defined business model and questioned how she could support payouts as high as she was offering. Most folks are tuned to the rise and fall of the stock market and know little about other strategies, not realizing how much their "caution" is based on history. By now, many of those whose parents lived through Depression years have grandchildren of their own, so quite a number of people are a generation or two removed from "hand-to-mouth" subsistence living - now take for granted much of what their grandparents had to live without while they were growing up in the '20s and '30s and through the '40s in our country.

The nation is now in a time of comfort and societal largesse in which individuals can be more creative with their time than practical as they had to be six or five or even four decades ago. So many of us are still engaged in short-term thinking, however; not connecting to values of history, not seeing future impact of current events ... such as an online payment processor exploiting its position for profit which is purely greed ... while some on the Internet apparently cheer them on.

It should begin to dawn that "profit motive" is not the same for all of us capitalists - that some of us are not motivated by what we can accumulate personally, but instead are driven to explore how we can use our minds for the benefit of others, sharing profits with a wider community. That is what I think motivated the lady who is now accused by the SEC of running what it describes as "almost purely a Ponzi" and I think her downfall is really one common to many innovative entrepreneurs: bookkeeping practices.