Re:Alienation 101: On Chinese Students in the American Midwest
by CamTin on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @05:07AM
(#14795221)
The obvious answer is that "non-profit" doesn't have a meaningful definition outside of the tax code. "Profit" is an accounting trick, for one, so any "excess money" (the commonly-understood meaning of "profit") can easily be funneled into grants, administrator salaries, larger workforces to satisfy administrators' urge to play primate dominance games, etc.
Another one is that "non-profits" (in the tax-code sense) are actually allowed to make a profit (both in the accountants' sense of the word, and the ordinary sense). Hospital systems, for example, often make huge profits, while hiding behind a non-profit status that they've inherited from the bunch of actually-charitable nuns who started running the hospital 150 years ago.
Or perhaps we could further refine that "love for money" as "beyond necessity" and "within necessity"...but the problem is very difficult for an external observer to tell where the boundary lies for a particular entity -- although that boundary does exist in many cases...