> As I understand it, capitalism is the free exchange of goods and services centered around personal property. Not really; that's just a free market, which is

> As I understand it, capitalism is the free exchange of goods and services centered around personal property. Not really; that's just a free market, which is linked to but not the same as capitalism. The core principle of capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. It's just that most of the capitalist societies we know do free-market capitalism specifically. And there absolutely is a single variable: Profit. It's the one and only variable capitalism optimises for, and anything else requires some form of intervention by tying profit to some other variable (e.g. a carbon tax to make greenhouse emissions more expensive, thereby making it more profitable to avoid these emissions); but that's always just an external force steering the market (thereby making it less of a free market), so it's not capitalism itself optimising for environmental preservation over profit. > Each individual uses their own set of values in evaluating the net value they get out of the trade On a small scale, this might be true; but we don't live in a world where most capital gets moved around by small businesses with owners that act based on their moral convictions; we live in a world of massive mega-corporations that shouldn't be expected to follow any moral principles, and that's exactly what we observe: they will do literally whatever they can get away with as long as it increases profit. At the end of the day, CEOs answer to shareholders, and the only thing they care about is how much money they're making and whether they could be getting into legal trouble for it (to some extent, at least).