Capitalism is not the villain of this story. It is a tool — a method for harnessing individual self-interest toward collective benefit. Used well, it has lifted more people out of poverty than any system in human history.
The villain is the Limited Liability Corporation: a legal structure that removes personal consequence from business decisions, systematically incentivizes amorality, and — absent strong regulation — will lie, cheat, pollute, addict, and kill whenever doing so improves the quarterly return. This post is about why, and what to do about it.
What is wrong with capitalism?
I blame Limited Liability Corporations.
Let’s be clear: Corporations are not human beings. Corporations have no conscience. Corporations are immoral, doing whatever it takes to survive. Capitalism tried to harvest that greed to benefit all mankind. Most would say it's been successful; however, without regulations, Corporations will do anything to improve their profits. They will lie, cheat and steal. Corporations will force their costs on anyone they can, refuse to clean up their messes and kill people if it means they will make more profits. They have no other incentive without regulations. As Limited Liability Corporations the owners have no fear of retribution from the state, except to lose their investment. It’s a perfect storm of corruption.Capitalism is designed to harness this immoral greed and attempt to benefit mankind. And it works surprisingly well. The number of people in abject poverty has fallen absolutely in the last few decades. [URL 1] Corporations don’t give a shit about mankind except that’s where some of their profits lie. Corporations have no structural incentive to care about mankind. Did the tobacco corporations care that they were killing their customers? Only in the sense that they had to get new, younger customers hooked to keep their revenue stream going. It cost too much to keep the older ones alive, it was cheaper to lie, obfuscate and preach doubt to recruit the younger generation to their addictive death-dealing drugs. Same for the opioid crisis. Same for the fossil fuel business.
Think about the coal business. In the US it’s dwindled to 40,000 workers. Burning coal causes almost 100,000 early deaths every year in the US alone, as documented by this global warming/climate changing denier administration [URL 2]. Burning coal puts more radioactivity in the atmosphere every day than the nuclear industry has ever put into the atmosphere. [URL8] And that includes Chernobyl. It’s burning the globe to a crisp, but the industry doesn’t care. Why should they? They still make profits. These companies are immoral. They will bribe politicians and lie to the public to continue making profits.
The market is not ‘self-correcting’ when it comes to death and morals. The market only moves towards more profits for the corporation. Can we pollute and make things cheaper while killing hundreds of thousands? Sure! Let’s do it! The calculus is straightforward: pollute and profit. Remember, Limited Liability Corporations were invented to enslave the world. Who ran the colonialist empires? Corporations. You could invest your money, with no consequences for immoral acts the corporations used that money to commit. And you would get a good return on that investment! It's amazing how much money the colonizers could extract.
Corporations don’t care about their employees except as delivering a service at a cost. If they weren’t forced to provide healthcare and safe working places, they wouldn’t. If they weren’t forced to not use child labor. They would [URL 3]. They are immoral. And immoral beings are evil. Corporations are the equivalent of psychopaths, all of them. Without regulations we saw what happened. They polluted our air, they polluted our waters, they sold poisonous food, they peddle quack remedies that at best are harmless, at worst cause death and destruction. They lie, cheat and steal. They were invented to enslave the world. Think about that for a second. Have they changed their ways? No. They’ve only responded to raw naked power. They fight for monopolies, they collude to increase their profits. For anyone to think unfettered, 16th century, Colonial Capitalism is the right economy for the world is out of step with history and freedom. This would enshrine and increase economic inequality, not a good thing [URL 4]
For the analysis of how corporate capture of government produced the specific political conditions of the Trump era, see: The Power of Trump (2020).
That’s right. The stand of the Republican Party to unconditionally support "Free Enterprise" is not a good thing for the world, let alone for America. The party has been coopted by the corporations which has allowed the amoral corporations to coopt the regulatory departments. The industry staffed government regulatory department allow whatever industry requires to increase profit. These corporations blame everyone else for their own problems and pollutions, force society to pay their cleanup and infrastructure costs while extorting monopoly rents from the masses for profits and extract public subsidies for their losses. Cruel capitalism for the masses, socialist welfare for the corporations.
Why are corporations amoral? Because they are Limited Liability. The state has promised not to prosecute you beyond taking your investment. You are not at risk from the state for anything the corporation does. This makes investment an actual business, not an unlimited risk that nobody could afford to take. Further, the current legal theory is that these corporations exist only to return the maximum profits to their investors. [URL 5] This implies that the corporations are incentivized to lie, cheat and steal to improve profits, as fines are hardly ever more than profits. This means that shareholders could sue the company if it does something that reduces profits, for any reason. There is an inherent incentive for the corporation to be amoral or even immoral.
For the Friedman Doctrine as practiced by the Wall Street Journal's opinion page, see: Wall St. Journal Nails It Again (2020).
Given this fact, it is obvious that we do not want these amoral corporations corrupting government.. or public opinion. They should be disbarred from donating to politicians, political action committees and, just like churches, they must be forbidden from recommending politicians or political questions or lose their limited liability. They are different from humans: they can only be bankrupted or disbanded by the state, and they can be reincarnated by anyone. They can be restricted from advertising on the air waves to the public. They can be forced to label their products as harmful and addictive. They pay taxes at different rates than humans.
To stop the damage that immoral corporations are inflicting on the world, we would need to reverse the Citizen's United decision at a minimum. [URL 6] We may need to increase our ability to control advertising, especially false claims. We may have to change campaign finance laws. This list is neither complete nor sufficient. To make the government stop ignoring the will of the people, we must change the way government is financed. This will require a long, dedicated effort. You can support this work done by the smartest person I know on constitutional law: Lessig.org [URL 7] the leading constitutional law scholar on campaign finance reform.
Thanks for reading,
-Dr. Mike
For the full analysis of how Citizens United functions as legalized corruption, see: Political Corruption (2025).
