At a loss for the definition of profit

ColoradoBoulevard.net's explanation for a Pasadena, CA, restaurant closure strikes me odd: (Emphasis mine)

Colorado Boulevard has learned that the Fresh & Easy store on the corner of California Boulevard and Lake Avenue will be permanently closing its doors in the next few weeks. Some sources indicated the closure may take place in two weeks.

Yucaipa Companies, parent company of Fresh & Easy, plans to close fifty under-performing stores. Sources pointed out to [sic] the fact that the Pasadena store was making profit, but not enough to offset the cost of its high rent, which in turn deemed the store not profitable in the long run.

I'm wondering if the author just got a bit sloppy or if he, like many, doesn't understand that profit is what remains after all expenses have been paid. If the restaurant is not making enough to offset the cost of rent, it's not making a profit. If it is, indeed, making a profit, it has more than enough to pay the rent.

Maybe the restaurant isn't making enough profit, so that the owners feel their money is best invested elsewhere. Or maybe they foresee something cutting into that profit "in the long" run and they are getting out while they can. Hard to know what's going on from this description.

Market entrepreneurs versus political entrepreneurs

I just watched the first part of Bill Whittle's interview with Dr. Burt Folsom, author of The Myth of the Robber Barons.

Folsom makes an interesting and important distinction that I would like to see work its way into our public discourse: the difference between what he calls market entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs.

Market entrepreneurs are those who try to succeed by competing in the marketplace and selling things at a competitive price. Political entrepreneurs are those who try to succeed by using government subsidies or regulations to gain an advantage in the marketplace.

Market entrepreneurs are heroes. They create wealth for themselves by giving value to others. The only way they can succeed is by finding ways to deliver a better product, one that consumers will be willing to voluntarily exchange for their hard-earned money.

Political entrepreneurs are leeches. They use their power and influence to buy government favors and rig the system, typically by getting politicians to give them taxpayer dollars or pass regulations that give them an unfair advantage over the competition. We sometimes call political entrepreneurs crony-capitalists, but that is a misnomer because they aren't capitalists at all and calling them that gives capitalism a bad name.

One of the strongest arguments for small, limited government is that it breaks up the corrupt partnership between political entrepreneurs and the government they need to exploit to succeed. Without government, businesses have no real power over us. If we don't voluntarily buy their products, they go out of business.

This is why political entrepreneurs love a big government with extensive powers. It gives them many ways to bribe, control, and manipulate things for their own profit. A lean government with few powers -- like the one the Founders designed for us -- denies them a way to control us. There is less taxpayer money to steal, and a government that has little power over us is not much good to them.

Capitalism can't fund Socialism

Best thing I read today:

Whatever the outcome of the American presidential election, one thing is certain: the fighting of it will be the most significant political event of the decade. Last week’s Republican national convention sharpened what had been until then only a vague, inchoate theme: this campaign is going to consist of the debate that all Western democratic countries should be engaging in, but which only the United States has the nerve to undertake. The question that will demand an answer lies at the heart of the economic crisis from which the West seems unable to recover. It is so profoundly threatening to the governing consensus of Britain and Europe as to be virtually unutterable here, so we shall have to rely on the robustness of the US political class to make the running.

What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic premise of the politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market economics and a democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic formula in which the wealth produced by the market economy is redistributed by the state – from those who produce it to those whom the government believes deserve it – has gone bust. The crash of 2008 exposed a devastating truth that went much deeper than the discovery of a generation of delinquent bankers, or a transitory property bubble. It has become apparent to anyone with a grip on economic reality that free markets simply cannot produce enough wealth to support the sort of universal entitlement programmes which the populations of democratic countries have been led to expect....

[T]he myth of a democratic socialist society funded by capitalism is finished. This is the defining political problem of the early 21st century.

Read the whole thing.