Economy

Economic bell-weather Caterpillar close plants and lay off thousands.

Ethics of entrepreneurship and profits in a free market.

"What can be unambiguously stated about a capitalist’s profit or loss is this: His profit or loss are the quantitative expression of the size of his contribution to the well-being of his fellow men, i.e., the buyers and consumers of his product, who have surrendered their money in exchange for his (by the buyers) more highly valued product. The capitalist’s profit indicates that he has successfully transformed socially less highly valued and appraised means of action into socially more highly valued and appraised ones and thus increased and enhanced social welfare. Mutatis mutandis, the capitalist’s loss indicates that he has used some more valuable inputs for the production of a less valuable output and so wasted scarce physical means and impoverished society."

Unfortunately, this is not true in a coerced market.

"Money profits are not just good for the capitalist, then, they are also good for his fellow men. The higher a capitalist’s profit, the greater has been his contribution to social welfare. Likewise, money losses are bad not only for the capitalist, but they are bad also for his fellow men, whose welfare has been impaired by his error."

In praise of profits.

“The capitalist’s actions and profits are just, if he has originally appropriated or produced his production factors or has acquired them — either bought or rented them — in a mutually beneficial exchange from a previous owner, if all his employees are hired freely at mutually agreeable terms, and if he does not physically damage the property of others in the production process. Otherwise, if some or all of the capitalist’s production factors are neither appropriated or produced by him, nor bought or rented by him from a previous owner (but derived instead from the expropriation of another person’s previous property), if he employs non-consensual, “forced” labor in his production, or if he causes physical damage to others’ property during production, his actions and resulting profits are unjust.”

This is the difference between a free market and a coerced market.

"Logically, the institution of a state has a twofold implication. First, with a state in existence all private property becomes essentially fiat property, i.e., property granted by the state and, by the same token, also property to be taken away by it via legislation or taxation. Ultimately, all private property becomes state property. Second, none of the state’s “own” land and property — misleadingly called public property — and none of its money income is derived from original appropriation, production, or voluntary exchange. Rather, all of the state’s property and income is the result of prior expropriations of owners of private property.
The state, then, contrary to its own self-serving pronouncements, is not the originator or guarantor of private property. Rather, it is the conqueror of private property. Nor is the state the originator or guarantor of justice. To the contrary, it is the destroyer of justice and the embodiment of injustice." 

That's coercion.