You're meant to get less radical as you get older, aren't you? It's what everyone says everyone says. The problem I find is that as I get older I see less and less justification for the existence of profit. It's there, it lives in the economic act of more and more of public life every year as the right wing sell off the schools, security contracts, hospitals and postal services that we grew up owning (apologies to older readers, who wrestled these things into public ownership, and must watch as the family silver is bargained away for three magic beans).
Now that I'm out of education, I have the blessed ability of working all day to make sure someone else can make money. Each pint that I pour pays for buying in the beer, the costs of keeping it at the right temperature, the slow but inevitable wear and tear, money to prevent workers from starving and a certain amount of profit, paid to the owner of the brewery, for his ability to have started the company years ago.
But I can't for the life of me think why he gets that money. Its is right, and good, that he was rewarded for the hours of work that he put in the build that brewery. Contacting pubs to sell to, and creating the beers. Designing logos, doing something with the ridiculously named Mash Tuns.
But this week, at our pub (not at the brewery, where he still works), he has done precisely nothing.
In reward for this he gets paid.
This is not some abstract man I have conjured. He's a good man, and someone who has explicitly told me that he does not want to "nakedly profiteer" (his words) on a good cause that is being run from the pub. I like him.
But I don't see why he gets paid when I pull that pint.