How do you think revenue is generated? People give you money because they rather have your good/service than the money. Selling something to someone is benefitting them.
> Selling something to someone is benefitting them.
This is so myopically capitalist. It's like the argument for the free market distilled into a single sentence.
People would not just rather have the good or service than the money; people have no use for money. Money isn't a real thing. It's an artificial construct designed to allow us to exchange goods and services freely and to avoid loss.
Exchanging money has nothing to do with a benefit for the consumer. It is simply an exchange. There is no law of nature that says all exchange is fair, or a benefit. Quite often, the buyers are at a disadvantage. The entire idea of providing for a "need" precludes that someone can be taken advantage of.
If you sell me cancer drugs at $800 a bottle, it benefits me in that my cancer is staved off for a month. But then I have no more money, and can't buy the drugs, and die. Who did it really benefit?
>Exchanging money has nothing to do with a benefit for the consumer. It is simply an exchange.
Why are you making the exchange if it doesn't benefit you?
>There is no law of nature that says all exchange is fair, or a benefit.
Fair has nothing to do with anything. I never used that word. Don't put it in to my mouth.
Sure there's no law that says an exchange has to be beneficial to you. Do what you want. But most people choose their actions based on self interest and make trades that are beneficial to them.
>if you sell me cancer drugs at $800 a bottle, it benefits me in that my cancer is staved off for a month. But then I have no more money, and can't buy the drugs, and die. Who did it really benefit?
You benefited by a month of life. How is that not incredibly obvious?
... And then died due to the loss of money from the transaction. A transaction with a short term benefit that results in long term disaster is not really a benefit. It's like being sold slow poison.
A benefit is a profit or an advantage. People often have no choice in what they buy, or are forced to buy something. Like with the cancer drugs, if their only other option is to die, it really isn't a choice.
People can also be sold things that are bad for them that they need, like heroin. Buying heroin is not a benefit. Then there's buying things that are more unintentionally harmful, like blankets full of smallpox sold to American Indians, or overpriced half-faulty weapons sold to resistance fighters. Sometimes nations are forced to buy and sell goods at an inflated price only to later be accused of not supporting local goods more for political gain, making their transactions only beneficial to the banks that hold their money or the multinational corporations that provide the goods and services in the first place. At the far end, a grocer paying protection money to gangsters results in losing money, but no benefit.
In the real world, people do things for a variety of reasons, and not always good ones. I believe your argument is a facile generalization that completely ignores the reality of trade.
>... And then died due to the loss of money from the transaction. A transaction with a short term benefit that results in long term disaster is not really a benefit. It's like being sold slow poison.
Extending their life by a month doesn't result in the long term disaster though. They already have cancer. I don't follow extending life = slow poison at all.
>People often have no choice. Like with the cancer drugs, if their only other option is to die, it really isn't a choice.
So the benefit to performing the trade is so great that they wouldn't even consider not making it is somehow an argument against the trade being a benefit?
The rest of your argument appears to just boil down to "there are exceptions". Cool, checkmate on that one. You found exceptions. Bravo.
This is by far the strangest thing I've ever heard.