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Profits are not evil on their own: the choices of which costs that are paid, and which costs are externalized (read: paid for by someone else without a correct combination of consent and total knowledge) all together add up to some value on the virtuous-neutral-vice scale.

Profits are what drives the economy forward. They provide the capital to expand operations and create new ones.

They also provide the surplus needed to deal with pollution and other externalities. It's not a coincidence that unfree economies are the worst environmental disasters.

> Outside of rent seeking, which I regard as fairly rare

This is a big assumption to make. Successful rent seeking is very much a constant interest of profitable organizations--why would a business leave low risk, high margin money on the table? Competition for rentier status would be just as lively as market competition were it not for regulation, and even with it the focus only shifts to competition for regulatory capture.

That’s too reductionist.

Big corps are making huge profits while laying people off.

Pursuit of an outcome alone isn’t enough. The process too must be in service to humanity at large to reach your conclusion.

Too many processes today benefit a minority.

I feel like sweatshops need a re-branding campaign. It's so easy to paint them as a negative, and even the most vocal capitalists will shrug and suggest they're something neutral. Sweatshops are a tool, and a powerful one at that. As opposed to outright slavery, which I regard as fairly rare, sweatshops are used by entrepreneurs to deliver value in excess of the costs to produce the value. Spread out over the size of a community, region, or nation, that's like magic!

Furthermore, they're not cold and unemotional, as is suggested here. Value almost always has an emotional component. The profitable clothes that sweatshops produce aren't going to be worn by automatons. They'll be worn by people - people who will date, get married, have children, people that will graduate from high school and college, people that will march in parades, protest in political movements, enjoy and create culture. To look at the value that companies want to create in sweatshops like a shameless cash grab ignores the very humanity that assigns that value in the first place.

Sweatshops are not evil. They're a tool for efficient production of value, and value implies a benefit for humanity.

Yup!

Sweatshop (n.) Factory located in a country whose peasant farmers are so poor that I'd rather not think about them, and serving an export market.

People who work in sweatshops do so because the alternatives are worse. The sweatshops tend to disappear as the surrounding economy gets more prosperous, and people have more choices.