The root of all evil
For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
I have heard the above Bible passage quoted in defense of money, as if to say that no, money itself is not the root of all evil, but that it's the love of money that brings grief. I will argue that money, by its very nature, ruins everything it touches.
Imagine that you're a baker. You love baking bread, you do it well, and you use good ingredients. People buy your bread because it's good. After a while, you can't keep up with the demand, so you open a business and hire some people to help with the baking. So far so good: it's all about the bread. The demand keeps growing, and eventually you can no longer manage everything. So, you hire someone to deal with the money, and let you take care of the bread. Things have just taken a turn for the worse.
Chances are that this person knows nothing about bread, but he doesn't have to — you hired him to deal with the money, and he needs to be good at just that.
Here is where the problem starts. You understand, love, and value bread, you take care making it, and you try to improve your recipes to make even better bread. The person that you hired to deal with the money, however, presumably understands, loves, and values money. He, in turn, takes care making it, and tries to improves his recipes for profit. You are now at odds with each other, because making high-quality bread costs more and brings less profit, and making more money means the bread tends to become shitty as a result of cutting costs. The more money the company earns, the further it grows and the more people need to be hired. Again, chances are that more people will be hired to handle the money and logistics than those that actually make the bread.
At some point you will realize that the amount of people who have nothing to do with bread dramatically outweighs those who do, and that their relative value to the company has increased. The senior vice-president of this and the department manager of that are now more important to the company than the people doing the actual work. By now nobody cares about the bread except for a few people; the only thing that matters is profit. You're still making dough, except it's a different kind of dough. Nobody ever stops to ask themselves just how much profit they really need. Often by this point you are left with only two options: become like them or become obsolete. That the latter is even possible is absurd.
Of course I am oversimplifying almost everything, but the fact remains that money inexorably takes over and becomes the main goal. This system is profoundly sick. Actually, maybe it was deficient to begin with. The point is that an idealist cannot survive in this system with his soul intact, which is ironic, because without the idealists who started them, most businesses today would not exist.
To me, that is the tragedy of business.