> No, the whole point of a capitalist business is to produce returns for the business’s owners. Acquiring and retaining customers is valuable insofar as there i

> No, the whole point of a capitalist business is to produce returns for the business’s owners. Acquiring and retaining customers is valuable insofar as there is more value to be profitably extracted from the customer; it is instrumental, not an independent goal. This is completely wrong. You can’t have returns without customers. > Extracting maximum value at minimum cost (maximizing return on investment) is what business is about. Everything else is about techniques to achieve that goal. You've apparently been distracted by the techniques to acheive the goal and missed the actual goal. Creating customers is not a “technique”. It is the essential act. You can have a business that’s not profitable. You can have a business that doesn’t attract much investment. You can have a business that doesn’t maximize profit. But you can’t have a business if you have no customers. You’re so distracted by profit and investment that you’ve convinced yourself it’s possible to have a successful or profitable business with no customers. > “practical monopoly” is One whose existence is evidenced empirically through behavior in 5he market and absence of competitive substitution rather than by arbitrary, non-empirically grounded description of market categories. In other words, “I know it when I see it”.