What is the role of profit in a market economy?
It's the commission paid to the parties that manage to efficiently connect individuals, as producers, to individuals, as consumers. Those connections, in the age of super-speciality (which, whether that phenomena be on the whole a positive or negative for the human condition, has facilitated tremendous prosperity for society and significantly increased prosperity for most all of its members), are no small accomplishments. They are often taken for granted and (rhetorically, at least) under-appreciated because, well, they exist; but they represent a fundamental defining aspect of life as we know it and are, arguably, the most important pieces of the puzzles that are our economic systems - our way of life. At the least, the relative quality and character of those ingredients are that which is most responsible for the relative success or failure of those systems. Show me a relatively prosperous society and I'll show you policies and entities - businesses, as we call them - that have efficiently and vibrantly connected the workers in all of us with the users/need-ers/want-ers in all of us.
Whatever success workers achieve and whatever prosperity consumers enjoy, and though they themselves individually deserve credit and are likewise responsible for it, that success and prosperity is facilitated by the connections between them, and thus by those that make the connections. We pay the latter a small (and sometimes, admittedly, large) commission for that facilitation. But, it's money well spent - good bang for the buck - a high value proposition - for all involved. Considered not in the abstract, but quantitatively (and sometimes otherwise), we call it profit. The quest for it is the profit motive: the fuel on which runs the engine that drives, and defines, society as we know it.
