I would argue that if you can't make a profit you have shown you are tasteless. If other people don't enjoy it enough to pay you, that says a lot about how out of step you are.
wait - I though I was arguing for consensus here and everyone else was calling me wrong
If all I have is a yardstick, and I'm trying to measure weight, then I would probably be much better served using a qualitative method than by trying to use the yardstick.
Its value comes from agreement by a large number of humans that it is valuable.
A stack of Benjamins would be nigh-valueless to people from 9th-century China.
And to be clear, I don't think this is a bad thing. It's necessary to keep civilization working.
The violence, once enacted, is an objective fact.
The threat of violence is still there only due to the collective subjective agreement that countries exist.
The IRS would have no functional power if Washington, D.C. and other major US cities were destroyed in a nuclear exchange.
I could imagine many citizens still choosing to pay taxes of some sort and/or respect the value of physical dollars in such a scenario, but it would likely not be due to fear of the federal government. Possibly fear of local police, though.
if I inherit $44 million dollars because I happened to fall out of the right vagina the only thing it symbolizes is that I got lucky -- I could be a fat, degenerate bastard underserving of anything.
ditto for lottery winners.
not sure if that's a popular opinion. In which case it would be tasteless.
That's why making profit is sometimes seen as greedy, because it's money that could have been reinvested in the product.
Amazon in its early expansion phase never made a profit, because every cent was reinvested. And they didn't need to pay a cent of tax for that reason.