I like a bunch of the gist of what you are saying, but I feel like most capitalism is bad capitalism, that the short-sightedness's prevalence is almost always outrageous & deserves the hate it attracts.
Organizations have extremely short reward loops. People come and go & dont try to do the right thing for next year, much less the next 5 years. Markets & investors punish poor quarterly reports. Maybe there's an idealized version of capital where folks can play it smart, but it doesnt seem to be happening on this planet.
If I hire you to fix my car I’m not paying you if instead you fix the neighbors car
I didn’t say that. We put rules on corporations to protect shareholders. Nothing prevents shareholders from taking profits and giving them away.
But we don’t want the execs deciding to give away the shareholders moneys for them.
This is also where taxes come in. While others are maximizing profits we take a cut and distribute it to hopefully add some more good to the world
> i dont think a mutual benefit ought be required to do a little good
My personal cynical belief is that there is always a mutual benefit, it could be of different kind but everyone gets something in return. We value goods/actions differently and don’t place $ on every action, but every action has a cost.
It may not be the exact same statement, but it's very close in spirit. This should be beside the point; we should do things that are good because we can, not just because they make us money, but I usually tend to see there being a ton of potential for the engineer's idea to help make money.