Thank you for the comment, 
People forget that in a free market, profits are the reward for providing the best service to others. It's a win-win situation.
That's how the paradigm defends itself. And it is a good line of defense - if only it was possible to have it instead of the free market perversion we have now, it would be great.
Why is it no possible to happen? Because of the feedback loop driven by desire for profit. There is quite a lot of quotes from the wise and good businessmen speaking of profits as side effect of being excellent to each other, but they are in minority. Or rather they are the human face of capitalism. Behind them, however, there is vast and barren space claimed by faceless corporations driven by profit only, which means precisely what I wrote about before - everything is measured according to whether it is good or bad for financial condition. Move factory to China and let children work for 18 hours per day? Great. Dump chemical waste somewhere far away? Sure, as long as no one knows. Etc, etc.
"The best service to others" is a tricky part too. Food companies for example, with their sugar filled food substitutes - are they providing good service? We know (we here, at least) they are selling poison, but it tastes good, looks good, ads tell you that you feel great when you eat it... And they make big profit. Would they make great profit under the ideal free market conditions? They would say they are providing "the best service" and would we not believe them? With our so-called education system being what it is we would not know any better.
Therefore the ideal free market requires conscious consumers. But I seldom hear that part anywhere. How can we have conscious consumers?
1. People need to be able to know what a "best service" is, and it includes not only the final price... The price of the product is the last thing to look at really. More important is whether the product is even good for us (cigarettes?), for our physical and mental health, for people who produced it (Chinese children?), for environment, etc.That is a lot of information to learn and process.
2. For the point above to happen it is imperative that all the information is available. Readily available. Which is the opposite to what is happening right now, which is active hiding and limit of knowledge about where products come from, because that knowledge would be... bad for profit! :)
Ideal free market is based on providing the best service for others, where profits are merely rewards for doing so. However, by it's naive approach (remove all regulations!) it creates conditions where "the best service" is measured in profit. Why?
Profits are the common denominator, the easiest quantifiable facts, requiring the least effort to understand and compare, plus profits are great by themselves, are they not? Given our human nature and nurture which is profit*competition driven, in most cases profit seeking is much greater a motivational force that providing best service is. And by definition the highest power places in corporations are taken by those believe in profit - natural selection works this way there. And natural selection works the same among companies - honest and good are disadvantaged comparing to ruthless and unscrupulous.
And finally, when corporations are big enough, they are able to manipulate its environment, by sucking governmental subsidies, introducing regulations to make life harder for competition, making free market less and less free.
This is the paradox.
1. Educating people to be conscious consumers... but it's never going to happen, and we've no time for that anyway,
2. Educating people to be less competitive and more community-oriented... we've no time for that either,
3. Calculating prices of products according to their adherence to "the best service", including their impact to our health, wellness of producers (Chinese children!), environmental impact.. yeah, I know it's not possible. But if it was, it would be a very good solution,
4. Removing aspects of our lives from being exclusively provided by "free market".
The last point is where I was going to all along. The thing is, when the you walk the same road every day and there is a hole in it, and you keep falling into it, then you put warnings signs, then you try to fix the road, walk carefully, and struggle and struggle and then it dawns on you, you can spread you wings and fly above it.
Free market I consider to be unfixable, or rather requiring way too much effort, initial and on-going ever after, to be even worth it. And besides free market should be side effect of the freedom of the people, not the end goal. And more importantly free market answers questions already invalidated by technological progress.
The next post should be something like "what is opposite simultaneously to both capitalism and communism?"
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