You lost me here, and revealed much about your thinking. Please explain how a “market” is anything other than steady state if all externalities are accounted for? Profit, by definition, means getting something for nothing. Without externalities, capitalism doesn’t exist.
I took micro-economics in highschool, and when discussing how trade is overall beneficial, they trotted out the old example of two countries, each producing bicycles and bananas.
The purpose of the exercise is to show that if each country focuses on one item and specializes on it, everyone benefits.
I always found that example to be deeply disturbing. If given a choice, who would actually prefer to live the banana country rather than the bicycle country? Even in highschool this silly example demonstrated the absurdity of classical economics.
Profit, I would say, is really the same thing as interest, i.e. return on capital, just with the connotation of being less predictable.
And interest, I would define not as something extra for doing nothing, but as a deferred payment for the labor that created the capital, which serves the important social purpose of rewarding people for deferring the consumption of the fruits of labor.
That's why people have not found a way of eliminating it, even though usury has been criticized for thousands of years.
1. Externalities can be positive. For example, the government builds roads, and doesn't account for the benefit to private industry on their books.
2. You're in a forum with a lot of software engineers; do you really believe that every new piece of software that brings $X in revenue necessarily costs society $X somehow? What mechanism causes this? Saying everything has externalities is far from saying they are always significant, or if significant, they are equal and opposite to the internalized value.
It simply doesn't exist, so it's not considered.
So economic theory is blatantly biased towards the accumulation of profit for shareholders, and blatantly biased against a realistic assessment of the social costs of those profits.
Simple example: AirBnB. Some people - mostly property owners - make money.
Other groups - people who need to rent property at a reasonable price - lose money.
You won't find the latter represented on the balance sheet. What looks like a potentially profitable operation actually turns out to have a huge social cost. Effectively it's moving money from a relatively unprivileged group to a relatively privileged group.
This is not a hypothetical example - it's a real problem in the area I'm living in, where the supply of long-term rental property has almost disappeared because owners can make more money from short-term tourist rentals.
Economics relies exclusively on these kinds of effects. There is no concept of "social profit" which is a guaranteed positive benefit for as many affected parties as possible.
And without that, economic theory becomes a vicious feedback loop that prioritises the redistribution of money over genuine value creation.
There are vast swathes of economic literature and theory dedicated to the study of external and social costs and how to best estimate and adjust for them. Claiming there is no concept of 'social profit' in economics is akin claiming there is no concept of testing in software development...
Also, I've noticed how actual economists speak of "economic profit". Whether you use the word "economic" or "social" or anything else, the modifier implies there is some deeper truth than whatever a given accountant writes down.
What people seem to disagree about is whether everything that is not illegal is permitted, or whether businesses should be expected to adhere to implicit codes of ethics and proper behavior without specific regulation.
It's not surprising that many people want a strict separation of responsibilities, but obviously governments are having an increasingly hard time keeping up, partly because of technology and partly because of politics.
I don't think that a society where people compete with each other and are restrained by laws is fundamentally new; that's been around for thousands of years. It's just that information technology is increasingly enabling the exploitation of discrepancies between actual laws and the common assumptions about what they do.