It's strange. You come across a lot of people on a daily basis, whether on TV, on the Internet, or just in person, who believe that businesses are simply supposed to make a profit and that's how they function and really that's all they owe to society. When a business pursues its own self-interest everyone is showered with goodies and lives happily ever after. That's how the world works and that's how it has always been.
Well no, not really. That's been the general attitude for the last 30 years, and curiously things have generally been going to shit for that period of time, but it isn't how things have always been. Even economic actors themselves expressed other values than a naked lust for profit. One did it for the strength of one's nation. Or one thought one should take care of one's community or society. One thought that we should be doing it for the chillins. Even Adam Smith recognized that pure self-interest was not enough to order a society. He just saw it as a useful ordering principle to be combined with others.
Of course the business ethos has emphasized profit for centuries upon centuries, but profit didn't have to eclipse everything else and it doesn't have to now. Human beings are complex creatures guided by a complex set of motives.
You don't see a whole lot of people strutting around today proclaiming that might makes right. Its not okay for stronger people to crack weaker people over the head and take their stuff, at least in principle. But that is exactly what a pure principle of profit amounts to in material practice in the real world, stripped of the added complexities of economic concepts.
Within the bounds of a market, it is money, the exchange medium, that can be used to acquire any good or facilitate any service up for sale. The more money someone has in such a context, the more power is essentially available. Naturally, the more money someone accumulates, the more power, the more means that person has to traverse and manipulate that landscape, and the more means that person has of making more money, via investment, the purchasing and exercising of capital, the purchasing of rights to rent collection such as through land, intellectual properties, insurance agencies and etc.
A positive feedback loop. So via profit alone, an economic entity will grow and grow until it reaches constraints such as laws, social pressures, physical and ecological limits, and especially important, the boundaries of the market itself. Even then, if an economic entity becomes powerful enough, it can push back a lot of those constraints.
Laws can be modified via corruption. Social pressures can be assuaged via public relations. Some physical and ecological pressures can be overcome via technological innovation and/or simple externalization of negative ecological consequence, such as the dumping of pollution on someone else.
Most importantly, the boundaries of the market can be expanded, and they have been expanding for some time. I'm not just talking about privatization of public resources, though that happens too, but the opening of markets in foreign countries, which is usually done by force; contrary to what much of the American population believe, the market is not necessarily a natural formation. People tend to enjoy sharing with each other in a communal setting. It generally takes guns to come in and claim a resource that should really be available to everyone and charge money for it, for example.
And where the market can be expanded in political space, it can also be expanded within our minds. When almost everything can be bought, that leads to a habituation into thinking that everything is for sale. This tends to begin in the poor populations first. Those with little resources to trade for their well being are forced to put up for sale increasingly personal and/or sacred resources to compensate, such as their labor, or their own bodies.
The powerful find ways to get around the old constraints, constraints that were basically generated to protect the less powerful from complete disintegration. And with greater accumulative powers, the powerful become more powerful, and the powerless are left with less and less means to self-autonomy and actualization, and eventually even subsistence. After all, power is shared in the end. It has limits.
What I am getting at is that notions of community and even nation can at least counterbalance the destructive power of pure self-interest. One finds a delineated social entity to prize and preserve, and direct one's resources towards maintaining. But when concepts such as those melt away and alienation and fragmentation set in, then all the world becomes a playground for the power games of the powerful.
Might makes right, pure selfish pursuit of profit, it's all the same. Might makes right was an actual doctrine when monarchies were the primary form of political organization. It was an attitude that precipitated mass social unrest and cascading revolutions. Today it is the attitude that business is business. A man has a right to go out and make a profit. And so on. Let's go ahead and continue believing that is just fine.
