Profits are certainly without honor among the intelligentsia. The very word produces negative reactions, even from people who cannot give you a single reason why money carrying that label is worse than money called by other names.

Many professional athletes and entertainers earn salaries higher than what the vast majority of business owners earn as profits, yet there is no moral indignation from those who are in the business of moral indignation.

Some claim not to be against profits, as such, but against "obscene profits." Yet they offer no clue as to how we are to tell obscene profits from R-rated profits or PG-13 profits.

One of the supposedly damning charges against pharmaceutical companies is that they earn those famous obscene profits. The figure of 18 percent is thrown around and may even be accurate, for all I know. But it doesn't make enough difference to bother checking it out.

The unspoken assumption -- and fallacy -- is that high profits mean high prices. But, back in the heyday of the A & P grocery chain, its profit rate never fell below 20 percent for a whole decade -- and it was at that time the pre-eminent grocery chain in the country precisely because of its low prices and high quality.

Then, as conditions changed, other grocery chains found ways to operate at lower costs, enabling them to charge even lower prices than A & P, taking away its customers.

It has been estimated that a supermarket makes a clear profit of about a penny on a dollar of sales. If that sounds pretty skimpy, remember that it is collecting that penny on every dollar at several cash registers simultaneously and, in many cases, around the clock.

When a supermarket sells out its entire contents in about two weeks, that means that the dollar on which it made a penny of profit in the first half of January comes back for them to make another penny in the second half of January. By the end of the year, that dollar has come back 26 times and made 26 cents.

Does that mean that the supermarket is making a 26 percent rate of profit? Not at all. The rate of profit on sales differs from the rate of profit on investment, which is what really counts. The point here is that the relationship between prices and the rate of return on investment can be very tenuous. Continued...