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In response to profit facilitating exploitation, the individualists assert that entrepreneurs must be entitled to profit to drive competition and thus create the strongest society. Much like the biological theory of evolution, workers who help societal progress will be those who embrace a profit motive, who understand their entitlement to profit for their labor. One individualist, Sumner argues that, "the emergence of leading individuals brings progress, because they are the ones who innovate, who think, and who develop new ideas," (77). Simply put, without entitlement to profit, there is no motivation for the worker to innovate. Even more, entitlement to profit is related to the function of private property. While socialists would argue that private property is the root of exploitation, an individualist, Andrew Carnegie, saw private property as a means for maintaining social order. Carnegie showed that, "private property was a natural element of social order, obtained by industry and thrift and demonstrating the moral superiority of its possessor," (81). While the contrast between individualists and socialists is strong on this single issue, it is not limited to entitlement to profit.
Another distinction between individualist and socialist thought stems from differing assumptions about human nature, cooperative vs. self, and how they affect beliefs on who should own the means of production and how wealth should be distributed. Under socialist theories, human nature is inherently cooperative leading to the greatest social benefit from production owned in common. It was Owen who first suggested that, "the life of the individual would achieve a larger meaning through full integration into the cooperative life of the group," (60). However, this idea of cooperative human nature is taken one step further by Marx who coined, "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," (63).