Death: The Most Profitable Business

By Tipu Salman Makhdoom

Which are the most profitable businesses of the world? Neither creative, nor productive nor even entertaining; but the ones related to Death. Lots of it!

Two most profitable industries of the world are weapons and pharmaceuticals. One gets money to give us power of inflicting death on others, while the other takes our money in exchange for avoiding it. And we give a lots and lots of money to both of them, in exchange of lots and lots of deaths; and avoiding it.

The most profitable business of the world is weapons industry. Although the big chunks of profit in it comes from big time weapons, like fighter jets and tanks, etc, their demand increases during the times of wars. 

Now that large scale wars are getting more and more curtailed, largely due to emergence of interdependent global world, weapons industry is suffering. Suffering for a capitalist concern does not necessarily mean going into loss. They count less profit as a loss also. 

Karl Marx

So the new strategy that the weapons industry has devised is "investing" in the small scale internal conflicts. Obviously this investing comes with "marketing", which in this case includes encouraging such conflicts.

Adjusting the business with the current trends, therefore, weapons industry is now concentrating on small weapons. The product range covers from handguns to rifles and machine guns.

Thus the question is that when the whole world is fiercely against the internal conflicts, be they in Afghanistan, Balochistan, Syria-Iraq or just anywhere in the world, where the hell people there are getting all the weaponry from? 

Obviously the industrialists are not going to sacrifice their profits for such bookish concepts as good cause, morality and preciousness of life. Money is money!

The second largest industry after weapons is pharmaceuticals.

Unlike weapons, this is a very ethical industry. After all it saves lives. Really? Well it should have been but is not. As a hidden unannounced policy, pharmaceutical industry, which spends billions of dollars on research, does not spend money on research to find out cure for diseases common in poor parts of the world.

In the end, pharmaceuticals is an industry, a business. And it's sole aim is to make profits; more and more of it. It is not a charity and we are fools to expect such things from it.  

So is it the problem of the businesses and capitalism? Or is it a problem of our thinking which is encouraging such deadly trends? After all we find making more and more money as the ultimate criteria of success!