I, and many economists, would argue that the price signal, profit and "serving society" are more tightly interwound than many like Hideyuki are mislead to believe.
As a general rule obviously I agree, but there are clear exceptions all around us.
Also, people get set in their ways. You should be wary of thinking that you bring value, when you're just following habit. It's quite a trap, especially as you get older. Reevaluate from time to time.
I agree we should all re-evaluate from time to time, but if it's all you know and you just want to run out the clock before retiring so be it.
Naively, I would think making a profit is not strictly necessary to serve society as long as the business makes as much money as it pays out?
On top of this, it's impossible for resource allocation for most goods and services to be organised top-down. Knowledge about wants, desires, propensity to manufacture and supply is dispersed and distributed among billions of people (and always in flux).
Of course never allowing and redevelopment has its own problems, but the solution is probably somewhere in the middle.
That's fine, we have others. Efficiency is overrated because it leads to excess concentrations of capital, an economic diabetes if you will.
Knowledge about wants, desires, propensity to manufacture and supply is dispersed and distributed among billions of people (and always in flux).
Amazon, Walmart etc. demonstrate this to be wrong in many respects; in any case nobody was arguing for central planning, so it's irrelevant.