Profit Without Apology: The Need to Stand Up For Business by Onkar Ghate and Dan Watkins. (ARU Press, 2025)
This very useful book is a call to arms, mainly addressed to businessmen, though others can profit from reading it as well. (As we will see, “profit” is an apt word to use.) The authors are Objectivists, associated with the Ayn Rand Institute, who acknowledge Leonard Peikoff as, after Rand herself, their principal philosophical inspiration. Ghate is the Chief Philosophy Officer of the Institute and Watkins its main fundraiser; three other associates of the Institute are authors of one of the book’s chapters.
The book argues that business has had a very “bad press,” and to combat this, businessmen need to be bolder in their defense of capitalism. As Watkins puts it, businessmen are “too timid, too apologetic, too hesitant to declare that what they do is good.” (emphasis in original) In pursuit of such a bold defense, the Ayn Rand University has launched the Atlas Initiative, not to be confused with the Atlas Society, a rival Objectivist organization.
The need for such a defense is dire: “Even our most successful and respected business leaders are told they have a duty to ‘give something back’. We do not chastise successful scientists, artists, athletes, or even literal lottery winners ‘about giving back.’ But to succeed in business is to ‘take something from society,’ in Salesforce ex-CEO Marc Bennett’s words, and the solution is for businessmen to truly give back and have a positive impact.”
The assault against business is widespread, and the authors quote a number of prominent critics of business including, interestingly enough, “Fed Chief Alan Greenspan, blaming the self-interest of businessmen for a crisis he helped manufacture.” But Greenspan is an Objectivist himself, highly esteemed by Rand, who was reluctant to entertain any challenge to his Objectivist credentials by those close to her.
The authors aptly point out that businessmen have been responsible for great advances in public welfare since the onset of the Industrial Revolution around 1800. Population has increased, the span of life has been extended. communication has been revolutionized many times over, and people enjoy a standard of living that even the very wealthy centuries ago would have envied.
It is businessmen who have been responsible for these achievements, by inventing new products and bringing together people who can produce these goods and services. They seek the maximum profit possible, and so long as they do not do so by seeking special favors from the State, they do not take from society but to the contrary give to it. Businessmen should be celebrated and not condemned.
That is well said, but one caveat is in order. Successful businessmen seek profit, but it does not follow from this they are, if not always consciously, followers of the Objectivist doctrine that each person’s own life is his highest value. They may believe in other philosophies as well and even be guided by the teachings of religion. Not all religions oppose profit-seeking and teach asceticism, Dr. Ghate to the contrary notwithstanding.
I found the most valuable part of the book to be the forthright rejection of the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) ideology. In the name of DEI, people are required to hire persons designated as “oppressed.” If for example a business does not include blacks and the transgendered in executive positions it will be condemned. Refusal to hire whites is positively favored. The authors remark that under DEI, “You are guilty until proven innocent and you cannot prove your innocence.” (emphasis in original)
In another point of great value, the authors warn against opposing DEI in the wrong way: “Don’t support anti-freedom policies designed to suppress DEI. Anti-freedom policies achieve nothing positive. For example, faced with a political backlash against DEI in Tennessee the UT[University of Tennessee] system’s Division of Diversity and Engagement simply rebranded itself the Division of Access and Engagement.”
I wonder, though, whether the authors have in part succumbed to the danger against which they have issued so eloquent a warning. They endorse “colorblindness” and speak favorably of campaigns to end racial discrimination, by which they mean refusing to hire the best qualified candidate just because he is of a certain race. If someone can sue for racial discrimination, understood in this way, the door is open to the reimposition of racial quotas under another name.
Though the book has much to teach us, I found some of the claims in it, especially those in Dr. Ghate’s long essay on the philosophy of the American Founding, to be exaggerated and sometimes downright false, though Ghate writes with great rhetorical force, sometimes approaching that of Rand herself. He holds that, “as students of the Enlightenment, of Europe’s Age of Reason, the Founding Fathers believed in the perfectibility of man.” I hope they did not, and do not believe that they in fact did so. (Tom Paine may be an exception, but his weird cult of theophilanthropy (not atheism as Objectivists preach) attracted little attention in America.) No doubt we should strive to be as good as we can, but to think that we can actually become perfect is not the conclusion of reason but rather the expression of Romantic longings; and to reject perfectibility by no means commits one to acceptance of “radical evil” in Kant’s sense but rather exemplifies a robust sense of reality.
Dr. Ghate advances an interesting argument based on his claim that the Founding Fathers accepted the possibility of human perfection. According to him, British rule was not bad but reasonably good. The Founders revolted against it because it was less than perfect. Here his gnostic (in Eric Voegelin’s sense) ideology has blinded him to the text of the Declaration of Independence, which contains a very long list of grievances against both the British King and Parliament.
Despite these criticisms, the book is well worth reading, though I suspect the authors, should they read this review, will think that I have missed what is most essential. And from their perspective, they will be right.
