To Serve the Public, Seek Profits

>"There’s no point in trying to “reimagine capitalism.” Capitalism works by creating wealth. Equality comes best through the creation of ever-cheaper goods and services, not handouts. The supercomputer in your pocket, same-day delivery, heart stents, even perfect Costa Rican bananas in your ShopRite were all generated by reinvesting profits. Other “isms” typically fail because they eventually fritter away the wealth that capitalism had furiously created."

Capitalism, or any *-ism for that matter, only 'works' if it can successfully reproduce the political conditions which enabled it to flourish in the first place. Cheaper phones and stents are great, but they require rule of law, stability, functional administration, education, public health, social harmony, and so on. Shareholder capitalism isn't concerned with any of those (in the US liberal) conditions, it just kind of benefits from them and takes them for granted. When Disney censors itself to appease China, when domestic companies lobby the government, all in the name of profit maximisation, they're undermining the very (non-economic!) values that underpin the system.

Michael Sandel categorised this as moving from a market economy to a market society. Conflating markets or profits as an instrument with a way of life, and in the process undermining the cultural and political values that sustain the entire system.