Fundamentally, what a business does is exchange some good or service for some form of payment. So if you buy a chair for $30, you give the business $30 somehow and then they get a chair to you, somehow. Business can of course be more abstract/complex. Insurance, for instance, has deals where you pay some (hopefully) small-ish agreed upon amount at regular intervals. The insurance company will then give you large sums of money in the case of whatever events you are buying insurance for come to pass—e.g. a forest fire, theft, etc. That is of course, how stuff is supposed to work by the textbook.

Essentials

"Normal expenses" include things like groceries, clothes, and tools for work.

But life has gotten more complicated in the modern era. Using some kind of credit is extremely common—people go into debt for daily purchases with credit cards as well as get into complex payment plans for bigger things like homes and cars.

It is quite "expensive" to live—that's why we have this term "affordability" or even "livability" to talk about how in some places, you can work reasonable hours and earn enough money to pay your expenses and still have time to do other things versus other places where you might work 3 part time jobs and sleep for 4 hours each night to barely get by.

"Everyday business" involves what you practically need to get by day-to-day—food/water, clothing, and shelter. Then, there's everything else.

Creating Demand Creates Business

Beyond food/water, clothing, and shelter, there is everything else. This is where most of the money in the world is. Day by day, most people take care of "everyday business" stuff in one way or another—this could mean living in a tent, getting free Costco samples, and wearing the same clothes for three decades. Yet, all the essentials are met. This is not dating advice.

So people begin to produce things that go beyond the basics. Any large city will have many foods—not just to allow you to stay alive but to draw you in with artistic arrangements, various combinations of ingredients, and ingredients like salt and oil that can make nearly any product of the earth taste rich. People will rent land/office space and provide various services—whether it is a barber shop giving haircuts or an ice skating rink, you can exchange payment for people to give you access to things you can't or won't do yourself.

Up to this point, we're still talking about fine and honest business.

Fear

Where business gets bad is when it begins preying upon "customers" to create more demand. You can say that businesses that do this fail the "vibe check"—they add more negativity to the air without offering additional help, drawing in more money through harmful messaging.

The past year, 2020, has been super-charged by fear-based business. People will purchase additional security (like cameras to monitor their homes), protective equipment, and arrange the structure of their lives to avoid risk—at least this is the selling point.

Note that "fear is contagious"; so if one person is afraid of something (e.g. a darkmatter wave perturbation thingy) then suddenly others will begin to feel they too are licensed to fear this same thing. In modern jargon, we call this "raising awareness'.

So I might "raise awareness" of anti-Alan discrimination by making all sorts of posts all over social media so that other people too can be afraid of anti-Alan discrimination and help spread my message. Maybe they'll even buy a T-Shirt or something from me.

Coercion

Some "businesses" you have to interface with whether you want to or not, albeit indirectly. This is where taxation comes in. Governments dish out tons of money all over the place, and you often have little to no say in what's going on.

I would put compulsory education in this category; we're forced to pay for schools whether we like what they're doing or not. Nobody is really against "education" in the real sense of teaching people how to do useful stuff.

But what's happened little by little is that terms like "education" become equated with particular instantiations/institutions such that if you oppose some group—like a union—you will likely be branded as "anti-education" and called mean names like a Luddite Dummy-head.

Other forms of profiting off of coercion come from making money off of mandatory training, licensing, and regulating. Here, you don't really "make/do" anything—you're in the business of getting people in trouble.

This is not to say that there isn't a real need for regulation. I've read my Ayn Rand and I'm not one of these "anarcho-capitalist" types. The issue is whether the regulators and regulations are doing what they're supposed to do or if they are simply getting in the way of good, honest business.

In 2020, many small businesses had to shut down. Rules related to the Big Coof (TM) meant that restaurants had to change much of how they operated and put a lot of space to waste—chairs stacked on tables in empty restaurants...

Business owners were required by law to follow these guidelines. Breaking rules of course is possible, but you might get in trouble especially if you're surrounded by snitches.

I'm sure some businesses profited greatly from this all—many probably popped up just to meet new manufactured needs. You can see scores of "designer/fashion" masks, fancy COVID this-and-that posters, etc. None of this was "free"—people got paid handsomely to perpetuate this narrative.

Scams/Fraud

What I'll call a scam is a business built off of a model of a fake problem. If I tell you that you have some illness which you don't have and then convince you to pay me a lot of money for a product that does nothing, all I've done is lie and deceive to make my quick buck. This is a scam/fraud.

Ask yourself—do you think scam/fraud can occur at scale, even by our "sacred" institutions? Do shiny advertisements and snappy websites prove anything beyond lots of money spent?

Problems will present themselves to you

If you have a tooth ache, I don't need to tell you that you should visit the dentist. Someone with a tooth ache will most likely start seeking out options themselves to a problem they know they have. "My tooth is hurting and it is distracting me from other things I need to give my attention to!"

A lot of media is in the business of telling you about problems you didn't know you had. One might call this meddling in business that is not your own. Who does it profit to get enraged about issue XYZ when you are not in a position to do anything about it?

And the activist replies, "Oh, but you can do something about it. Give my NGO money and help spread awareness".

Money printer go brrrrrr...