That reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. While there are indeed predatory business models where this is true - casinos etc. - most highly successful people and businesses become successful by creating value, not siphoning it from others.
Would you prefer that they starve to death because they have no work? I assure you, that's worse than working at Foxconn.
> that their success in this society will rely on using and stepping on others who will now have less as a result, if not in their own community then in the international stage.
by saying that if the teenager in question properly understood economics they would understand that "most... businesses become successful by creating value, not siphoning it from others" and therefore not hold the opinion in that quote.
Your reading of the teenager's statement is, it seems, willfully narrow. It's true that if most businesses simply screwed their customers, they wouldn't survive long, with the exceptions that you mention. But I'm sure that's not what the kid in question meant, teenagers these days are smart cookies. They know that you can treat your customers well while screwing them sneakily (productize their data), screwing their community (use market dominance to force suppliers to lower prices, thereby accelerating offshoring and killing jobs), screwing some other community (locking in cheap resource contracts by bribing weak governments and thus fanning corruption), and the list goes on and on like that.
[1] http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Economics/Physics_of_the... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_heat
The adolescent here could be observing a short term trend relative to an underlying bigger picture. People are competitive by nature and the modern information age may be amplifying this for them, at least in perception.