Capitalism has never had problems with putting profits before the common good, the achievement of which should be the main aim of politics. This tendency has been abetted by the remark of conservative economist Milton Friedman that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”
In his 2012 Jefferson Lecture, writer Wendell Berry stated:
Corporate industrialism itself has exposed the falsehood that it ever was inevitable or that it ever has given precedence to the common good. It has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses, and small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously to conserve the wealth and health of nature. No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it, no pointless rhetoric on the virtues of capitalism or socialism, no billions or trillions spent on “defense” of the “American dream,” can for long disguise this failure. The evidences of it are everywhere: eroded, wasted, or degraded soils; damaged or destroyed ecosystems; extinction of species; whole landscapes defaced, gouged, flooded, or blown up; pollution of the whole atmosphere and of the water cycle; “dead zones” in the coastal waters; thoughtless squandering of fossil fuels and fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores; natural health and beauty replaced by a heartless and sickening ugliness. Perhaps its greatest success is an astounding increase in the destructiveness, and therefore the profitability, of war.
In his lecture, Berry mentioned the work of James B. Duke, who founded the American Tobacco Company. By 1907, thanks largely to Duke’s advertising and marketing efforts, U. S. cigarette smoking began to take off, quadrupling in the last 15 years of the nineteenth century. Stanford Professor Robert Proctor writes in his Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition “the cigarette kills when used as directed. An estimated 100 million people died from smoking in the twentieth century.”
In a 2019 article in LA Progressive, “The Opioid Crisis and the Need for Progressivism,” many instances of capitalism putting profits before the common good were mentioned, with Purdue Pharma’s marketing of OxyContin being especially highlighted. In an October 2017 issue of The New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe mentioned that “since 1999, two hundred thousand Americans have died from overdoses related to OxyContin and other prescription opioids.” By the beginning of 2018, about 48,000 people a year were dying of opioid overdoses in the USA. Simply put, Purdue Pharma put profits before any ethical considerations even if it killed people, many of which it did.
In another article of about four years ago in LA Progressive, other instances of putting profits before the common good were mentioned: wildfires started in 2017 and 2018 by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E); the 2018 and 2019 crashes of two Boeing 737 Max jets; Facebook in 2021 being accused of putting“astronomical profits before people.”
Next, three years ago in LA Progressive, an article on fossil fuel companies’ greenwashing (“misleading the public to believe that a company or entity is doing more to protect the environment than it is”) indicated another instance of the “profits-before-people” mentality.
Finally, a few nights ago, my favorite TV news source, the PBS News Hour, featured a segment on “forever chemicals” my last example of the above mentality. The program began with the revelation that a father in Hoosick Falls (“a once thriving industrial town in Northeastern Upstate New York”) died from kidney cancer only seven months after he retired (after 32 years at a company called Saint-Gobain).
In its processing, the firm used Teflon coating, and the man’s son, Michael Hickey, discovered a study that “showed a likely link between the chemicals in Teflon and various cancers, including kidney cancer.” Moreover, a local doctor confirmed that “he had seen a lot of cancer in his patients, but the city and the county wouldn’t test the water.” So the son tested the water himself—at his house, his mom’s, and the local Dollar Store and McDonald’s. And what did he find? Water contaminated by cancer-causing chemicals.
At this point the PBS segment introduced us to Mariah Blake, who had written They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals (2025), a book which related Michael’s discoveries. She relates how she had first written in 2014 an article in Mother Jones magazine. Even earlier she had discovered that some plastic dishes and food containers contained “the infamous hormone-altering chemical BPA.”
Digging further, she learned that “the plastics industry was well aware that many products marketed as safe BPA-free alternatives [like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS] actually release other damaging chemicals. For years, corporate scientists had been studying the problem and burying their own damning findings. At the same time, the industry had worked to cast doubt on research from outside scientists—often employing the same methods and consultants that the tobacco industry had used so successfully to discredit the science on smoking.”
Her research led her to a number of realizations. “First, the American chemical industry and the man-made materials that pervade our lives owe their existence largely to the U.S. government, particularly the centuries-long partnership between the government and the chemical giant DuPont. Second, chemical interests had not merely borrowed tactics from cigarette makers. On the contrary, they had invented many of the methods that Big Tobacco and other industries would later deploy to pick apart the science tying lucrative products to disease.”
Furthermore, she believed all her research led her to “understanding how we had arrived at this place as a nation. A place where mistrust of science hobbles our response to mortal threats like climate change. A place where simple acts like wearing masks to avoid deadly viruses are hopelessly politicized, where large swaths of the public spurn objective fact and impartial institutions, leading to an ever-more-divided society.”
Although Blake realized the positive effects of PFAS—they “have enabled lifesaving medical devices” and have “transformed thousands of everyday items, things like outdoor clothing, dental floss, furniture”—they are also “probably the most insidious pollutants in all of human history and they are literally polluting the entire planet.” Moreover, industry had known for decades that they were dangerous.
Following Michael Hickey’s discoveries and his and at least one other woman’s blood tests, some of those afflicted (or their relatives) filed multiple lawsuits against companies using PFAS, and in 2021 and 2025 the sewists won. Dupont, 3M, Saint-Gobain, and Honeywell settled large, multimillion dollar class action lawsuits over the pollution they caused.
In her book, Blake comments that “the implications [of PFAS] for public health are hard to overstate. But we can’t count on our leaders to protect us from these threats without intense, sustained public pressure. The companies advocating inaction are too powerful, the systems favoring it too entrenched. It is up to us to protect ourselves and make a safer future for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who will reap the consequences of the choices we make now.”
So, what is the answer to dealing with this “profits-before-people” mentality? Some form of democratic socialism, as Sen. Bernie Sanders advocates? Perhaps, but the courts and law suits such as mentioned above offer another possibility—just as the courts offer one opportunity for dealing with Trumpism. Yet, one woman on the News Hour episode, indicated such suits are not enough—“We won a class action, but it’s just money…Nobody goes to jail. Nobody gets punished.”
Sanders himself suggests another possibility. A reviewer of a recent Sanders’ book about capitalism notes,“Some people would say that capitalism is immoral, no matter what form it takes. But that doesn’t seem to be Sanders’ argument. Rather than making the case for a Democratic socialist government, Sanders appears to want a reform of American capitalism” along the lines of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. In other words, more government regulation of the economy, but stopping short of full scale democratic socialism. (See also “Capitalism? Socialism? How about Just a Fair and Moral Economy?”)
Such regulation is just the opposite of what economist Friedman and capitalist leaders like Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and the U. S.’s Ronald Reagan—and Donald Trump—have advocated. But they forgot—or never realized—that the “main problem with having profits dominate our economic thinking is that such a single-minded pursuit can kill us, destroy our environment, or allow vast discrepancies in wealth.”
And they forget—or never realized—that once in U. S. history (1890-1914) there was a diverse movement “to limit the socially destructive effects of morally unhindered capitalism, to extract from those [capitalist] markets the tasks they had demonstrably bungled, to counterbalance the markets’ atomizing social effects with a countercalculus of the public weal [well-being].” It “did not attempt to overthrow or replace capitalism, but to have government bodies and laws constrain and supplement it in order to insure that it served the public good.” The movement was called Progressivism.
[Walter G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University. He is the author of Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (2002). Courtesy: LA Progressive, a California (USA) based online news and commentary portal, founded by Dick Price and Sharon Kyle, whose mission is to provide a platform for progressive thought, opinion and perspectives on current events.]
