It's not profit itself that is suspect, it is the attitude that "Under no circumstances should considerations beyond profit exist". This attitude leads to beliefs that anything at all should be allowed, if there is profit in it. Literally anything. Government provides a way to say "perhaps there are other considerations beyond profit". Since you only have the hammer of economics in your acceptable tool list, everything looks like a business nail, and you twist implausible scenarios in which business solves the problem. The rest of us say, oh there is this government tool, and there look, it solves the problem without contortion.

Yes there are people to whom government becomes the hammer. But they are not the same set of people who say "lets not go overboard with the nails guys". (for all nails)

> it is the attitude that "Under no circumstances should considerations beyond profit exist".

But that's a strawman. Companies are ultimately guided by the concern for profit - but they can only make a profit (long term) by providing a value to all their stakeholders. Of course companies can some times profit in the short term by screwing over one group of stakeholders, but generally they only get to do that once per stakeholder group.

> The rest of us say, oh there is this government tool, and there look, it solves the problem without contortion.

Hardly. Yes, it can solve the problem (it's hardly a rule that government actually solves the problems it takes on). But even the problems that can reasonably be said to be solved, there are more often than not some unintended consequences.

>> it is the attitude that "Under no circumstances should considerations beyond profit exist". >But that's a strawman. Companies are ultimately guided by the concern for profit - but they can only make a profit (long term) by providing a value to all their stakeholders. Of course companies can some times profit in the short term by screwing over one group of stakeholders, but generally they only get to do that once per stakeholder group.

This is semantic wrangling. It is generally pretty easy to create corporations. It would be even easier if the "regulation is strictly forbidden" crowd had their way. As it exists now, corporations are fairly anonymous, and as such, spinning out a corporation per "screwing" is not that hard. Sure long term value per corporation is non existant, but the long-term value of the strategy is pretty straight forward. It has already been shown that investment as it exists today favors short term profit over long term value anyway. Numbers this quarter are generally the main driver.

Further, without regulation preventing the screwing over of people, why wouldn't every company choose the guaranteed profit over other methods. They could just take the profit safe from the fact that anyone not generating gobs of cash right now could be simply "competed out of the market" via mechanisms that are currently illegal as monopolistic. It isn't conjecture either - those rules are a response to companies getting rid of the competition then as soon as the specter of "a good company" isn't looming over them, they returned to screwing people over.