Daily Archives: 2 July 2026

Record Profits

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Or at least near-record and with room to rise a bit more. These make those companies obvious targets for the Left and for the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, all of whom view those profits as immoral and needing to be confiscated by Government or as public goods needing to be confiscated managed by Government or both.

The net profit margin for companies in the S&P 500 rose to 14.8% in the first quarter, according to FactSet. This marks the highest net margin, a measure of the profit generated from every dollar of revenue, reported by the index since the data provider began tracking this metric in 2009. The previous peak of 13.2% was set just a quarter earlier.
It isn’t just tech companies, either. In the first quarter, multiple sectors including financial services and industrials reported net margins above their five-year averages.

Those companies would do well to pass some of those profits on to uses of their choosing, rather than just sitting on them. At the least, the companies need to state openly their plans for the future of the business and its accumulating profits and then demonstrably execute on those plans.

Those uses and plans might or might not make good business sense in the economic world, but it would make good business sense in the political world where the now-openly socialist Progressive-Democratic Party reigns over us.

Not Contentment or Fulfillment…

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…but security in their property ownership, along with their life and liberty, from which contentment and fulfillment may well result. A letter-writer in Monday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal has made that confusion. He wrote, in response to William Galston’s What “Created Equal” Means in America,

One of the inalienable rights with which all Americans are endowed equally by their creator is “the pursuit of happiness.” The operative word is “pursuit.” No person has a right to happiness, but all have the right to seek contentment and fulfillment by striving to live decent and dignified lives.

That’s not the happiness the inalienable right to pursue which that’s acknowledged in our Declaration of Independence, though. John Adams had made that clear beforehand in his Preamble to the Massachusetts constitution:

All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.

The natural, essential, and unalienable rights of life and liberty and of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property creates the capacity for contentment and fulfillment. The latter does not exist without the formers’ prior existence.