I don’t know how you can be confident that an imagined fake charity that disrupts medical service or food supply would ever be large enough to equal scale the harms caused by some of the most powerful global corporations.
But we’re talking about the relative harm of a bad new charity compared to a harmful business.
I think you agree it doesn’t make sense to compare the effect of our new charity versus, literally all of capitalism or a major global corporation.
But equally that billionaire could found an institution focused on turning a profit while doing harm and use the profits to grow the institution to a scale and concomitant harm that far exceeds what they would have been able to achieve with a non-profit.
Let’s be honest, we both know perfectly well, that your view and understanding of the world is that, if a business could make significantly more profit being evil, it would already be doing it. That niche would be filled. I probably agree.
But if that’s true, it must be that even an amoral business person could not make profit by doing the same evil—all the evil capitalists got there first. So there’s no evil super harm possible as described in your story.
why don’t we imagine that they do this by acting as a middleman that extracts a profit by reselling medical supplies for an unconscionable profit. This profit, in turn enables them to grow and slip their “services” between more people and their medical providers. While this may seem like a criminal enterprise, for many companies that exist today this basically their business model, and they operate at scales that eclipse most medical non-profits I know of.
Yes, basically, we sort of both agree this is happening.
The difference between our opinions is that, I think in healthy marketplaces, this profit seeking is extremely positive and saves lives (ugh, I sound like Kevin Murphy.)
Also, we both know that there’s not going to be any way to agree or prove eachother wrong or right about this specific issue.
And we’re really really far from the point here (and I think it’s better addressed by my other comment).
But we’re talking about the relative harm of a bad new charity compared to a harmful business.
I think you agree it doesn’t make sense to compare the effect of our new charity versus, literally all of capitalism or a major global corporation.
Let’s be honest, we both know perfectly well, that your view and understanding of the world is that, if a business could make significantly more profit being evil, it would already be doing it. That niche would be filled. I probably agree.
But if that’s true, it must be that even an amoral business person could not make profit by doing the same evil—all the evil capitalists got there first. So there’s no evil super harm possible as described in your story.
Yes, basically, we sort of both agree this is happening.
The difference between our opinions is that, I think in healthy marketplaces, this profit seeking is extremely positive and saves lives (ugh, I sound like Kevin Murphy.)
Also, we both know that there’s not going to be any way to agree or prove eachother wrong or right about this specific issue.
And we’re really really far from the point here (and I think it’s better addressed by my other comment).