Yeah, I think that saying that people are forced to optimize for profit and harm society in the process diminishes their personal agency. Even if you're startin

Yeah, I think that saying that people are forced to optimize for profit and harm society in the process diminishes their personal agency. Even if you're starting a new venture, you have a lot of choice in how you do it. Wikipedia and Craigslist are great examples. Craigslist is for-profit, and Wikipedia was originally a project of Bomis, a "web portal" (those words meant things 20 years ago) that tried various things to be profitable and had a good amount of success with softcore pornography. Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying, "You know the press has this idea that I am a porn king. I really wasn't a king of anything, frankly, you know? Because at the time, when we looked at it, we were just like, 'Okay, well, this is what our customers will want, let's follow this.'" And even he, the guy peddling pictures of naked women on the internet because it's what his customers supposedly wanted, ended up spinning off Wikipedia as a non-profit and winding down Bomis. When you decide to make a company that values profits above all else, it's a choice. You cannot attribute the moral impact of that decision to the invisible hand of the market - the invisible hand cannot reach out and grab things that weren't given to it.