Agreed. I'm a big fan of free markets. But the modern tendency toward a sort of fundamentalist capitalism is repulsive.

A good way to make a profit is to make something people need at a price they can afford while paying your employees well. But you can't work that backwards. Not everybody making a profit is creating value or contributing to society. If you don't have a conscience, or even if you're just not thinking very hard, it's easy to privatize a gain and socialize the losses. It's our job as citizens to make sure that is minimized.

Unfortunately, If you make something people need whilst paying your employees well you'll have to charge more than your competitors for it and most people simply will not buy it.We all pay lip service to wanting employees to be paid well (after all, we're all mostly underpaid employees ourselves) but the reality is that most people just want to stretch their meagre wages as far as possible. Which means compromising on quality, and ethicality.

That can happen, but it's not the only thing that can happen. Look, for example, at the way Toyota easily beat American carmakers for decades.

"Respect for People" was at the core of the Toyota Production System, and by that they meant both workers and customers. Their extensive investment in workers let them create better products for less money. Their refusal to lay people off cost them in the short term, but gained them substantial competitive advantage in the long term.

This only becomes more true the more we automate things. If machines are doing the dumb stuff, that only leaves smart stuff. And unhappy, underpaid people don't do smart stuff very well.

For those interested in how a different philosophy can lead to a deep competitive advantage, check out the This American Life episode on NUMMI: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561/...