Pericles I jesteth not! I can assure you that the profit motive has been around for a lot longer than the industrial revolution. People profited by having the means of making fire, by developing more efficient hunting practices etc. Money is not the only means by which one profits.

“Before then, duty, honour, charity and loyalty were the most prized characteristics of the ruling classes.” Well you could have fooled me!!

When has profit ever been seen as only a means to continue business? Businesses are formed for one reason only – to make profit. A business does not exist for the sake of its own existence. Making profits, according to the laws of the land, is the responsibility and duty of a company – especially a company that has thousands of share-holders, and no pie-in-the-sky socialist idealism can, will, or should change that.

That's a pretty weak sidestep bozzie. To suddenly decide that the word "profit" can mean "benefitting from the use of" certainly allows you to include fire, the wheel and hunting dinosaurs in your argument, but it carefully ignores the reality of today.

I - and I suspect most of the readers here - are referring to monetary profits. Like the twenty billion dollars of profit taken by our banking system that comes straight out of the pockets of everyone in the country. We have no alternative - try asking your employer to pay you in cash - in exactly the same way we have no alternative to public transport, electricity, water etc. etc. In the hands of private enterprise, we are no longer "members of the public" or "residents of NSW" but simply customers, whose task is to provide profits for shareholders.

To object to this form of extortion is not "pie-in-the-sky socialist idealism". As I mentioned before, I am a business owner, responsible to employees and customers as well as shareholders for the proper conduct of my business. I take a longterm perspective on these responsibilities, and making a profit is essential to this longterm view. However, it is not, and never will be, the sole reason for starting and running a business.

I suspect however that you are just saying the stuff you say because it sounds tough and macho - survival of the fittest and all that. Sadly, there are people out there who are unsuited to having to be part of the rat-race simply to catch a bus. Spare a thought for them occasionally, even if only because you might be one of them yourself one day.

I'm confused when people refer to government ownership of enterprises as "socialism". I understand socialism to be "workers' control of the means of production" (at least in the Marxist sense). I don't believe the Commonwealth Bank was a proletarian hotbed before the previous ALP Government flogged it off. When the state owns enterprises it is simply state capitalism. See Tony Cliff's work State Capitalism in Russia. It clarifies this point well.