Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Bach

A supposedly hard-nosed line from a writer best known for airy parables about freedom lands with a deliberate thud: profit, here, isn’t greed; it’s a diagnostic. Bach frames the marketplace as a kind of moral ecosystem where margin equals oxygen. If a business can’t breathe, it can’t keep good people, maintain quality, or absorb mistakes. “Best service” becomes the ethical alibi for insisting on surplus.

The intent is to flip a common suspicion - that profit corrupts - into its inverse: profit enables virtue. It’s a buyer’s-defense argument masquerading as principle. Bach isn’t praising ruthless extraction; he’s warning against the hidden costs of bargains that look altruistic but are actually under-resourced. The line quietly recruits the reader into complicity: you, too, should prefer the shop that charges enough to stay sharp, rather than the one that limps along on underpaid labor and deferred maintenance.

The subtext is also a boundary statement. “I don’t want to do business” is as much about refusing emotional labor as it is about evaluating vendors. It tells you he’s done subsidizing someone else’s poor model - and he’s not interested in being guilted into it.

Context matters: coming from a novelist associated with self-reliance and personal responsibility, the quote reads like an extension of that worldview into economics. It’s a clean, almost Protestant equation: sustainability is proof of seriousness. The sting is that it reduces “best service” to what can be priced, neatly sidelining co-ops, nonprofits, and scrappy newcomers whose excellence doesn’t always show up on a balance sheet.