Hmm..
It really depends how your business realtionships with suppliers are structured. Base price is whatever you chose it to be and is not as prescriptive as saying
The base price is what a product costs you, ie it does not include your profit margin or other markups and does not include tax. Now, why would you want you customers to know how much profit you make on a product?
It certainly can be used in such a manner and has been structured to facilitate such an approach
However some users have supplier agreements where discounts vary widely across product ranges and even within product ranges.
Trying to get VM to automate pricing uplift outside of a simple set of scenarios may prove too much of a headache.
As a consequence some users chose the base price to store ex-tax price and manage margins away form VM
As GJC states it is the "if" that is preventing baseprice being shown for non admin users
You will have to create template overrides in category and product views
if ($this->showBasePrice) {
echo $this->currency->createPriceDiv ('basePrice', 'COM_VIRTUEMART_PRODUCT_BASEPRICE', $this->product->prices);
if (round($this->product->prices['basePrice'],$this->currency->_priceConfig['basePriceVariant'][1]) != $this->product->prices['basePriceVariant']) {
echo $this->currency->createPriceDiv ('basePriceVariant', 'COM_VIRTUEMART_PRODUCT_BASEPRICE_VARIANT', $this->product->prices);
}
}