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… is from page 245 of the late, great UCLA economists Armen A. Alchian [2]’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics [3] (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.); this volume is an updated version of Alchian’s and Allen’s magnificent and pioneering earlier textbook, University Economics:
The profits of producers are not transfers of wealth from consumers, and the losses of producers are not transfers from producers to consumers. The profits are the economy-wide increases in wealth as a result of more valuable uses of resources.
Profits are the unpredictable, but now discovered, increases in values of the responsible resources. The former lower values underestimated the future use values. No one knew earlier what the value of the resources would prove to be, else their market value would already have been that high.