In both cases the goals are complimentary in some ways but conflict in others and one is purely monetary while the other might be progress towards many different societal goals.
Well it is if you tax those profits, obv closing loopholes.
Societies work when all the participants interests are aligned. If farmers can get rich growing crops, there will never be a famine.
Tell that the Irish, they were exporting food while suffering from the Great Famine. The farmers and landowners had no reason to help during the famine as it was more profitable to export.
Even today we throw away food for the simple reason that a shorter fake shelf life has been shown to increase profits over the actual shelf life. There is simply no profit to be made from redistributing the over abundance of food to people in need, worse it would cost money making a profit oriented person just shudder at the thought.
You're not considering that food has a limited shelf life, seasonal, difficult to distribute efficiently and the customers have highly variable purchasing powers. Also local production is incredibly sensitive to local environmental variation. We already produce enough food to feed nearly twice the global population, and yet plenty of people are malnourished.
I would personally suggest that the best way to prevent famines is to improve food storage and distribution methods, and have robust systems for environmental or conflict induced local famines. Though the unbalanced nature of consumer wealth is also important - it makes sense to waste 50% of your crop selling it in Europe if you can sell it for 3x as much than locally. So maybe the best thing is simply to raise the wealth of poorest people in the world?
If I'm missing a "wider point", can you elucidate?
For example, if my startup is renting servers from AWS our incentives are aligned in the sense that we'll buy more from AWS as we get more users; but unaligned in the sense that if we're using more resources than we need to AWS wouldn't profit from pointing that out. Indeed, even an externality-free positive-sum deal between two parties brings with it a zero-sum deal in deciding how to distribute the benefits.
I'm not explaining things well I think, hope you can make sense of that!
Sure, there is a certain strand of right-wing economist that has got the wrong end of Coase's argument about transaction costs would argue that virtually all forms of financial shenanigans could, in theory be solved by investor consortiums that stand to lose billions paying the bad actors more than the millions they could earn through malicious activity to desist. But I don't think any sane person believes that shareholders agreeing to overcompensate executives even more to avoid them seeking to profit from insider information at their expense actually is a more efficient solution than aligning those incentives through the legal system.
> Societies work when all the participants interests are aligned.
with:
Regulation ensures that people don't work against the greater good for their own narrow profit and we all lose out.
But you went with people "getting rich".
Some would argue that if some people are getting rich, and there's no competitors entering to bid down their profits, by providing more of what is desired at lower costs, then economic interests are not aligned properly.