The voracious and insatiable appetite for profit has led to some really disgusting practices for example:
- Goldman Sachs driving up food prices, which quite literally kills people, for profit [1]
- Hedge funds buying up trailer parks and jacking up the rates [2]
- Medical price gouging (eg epipens, insulin) [3];
- Abbott shutting down a baby formula plant that was poisoning infants to essentially end-run a possible investigation [4] where ultimately the government begged (paid?) them to reopen it; and
- Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a massive boon to the US military-industrial complex, a sector that might otherwise have found hard times thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ending.
If you look at these you see regulatory failure at pretty much every level thanks to the revolving door and resulting regulatory capture by these industries.
Compare this to China, who executed two people found responsible for a tainted milk scandal [5].
It's hard not to see just how much rent-seeking and monopoly-creating goes on in the modern economy. When is it enough?
[1]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/04/27/how-goldman-sachs-creat...
[2]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/15/what-happens-w...
[3]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/12/31/7926175...
[4]: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
[5]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...