So management will try to enhance profits by extracting the maximum value out of employees. They will try to work them as hard as possible for as many hours as possible, at the lowest wage they can get away with paying. As we routinely see in coal mines, management will try to reduce costs at the expense of workplace safety.
As Milton Friedman explained, behaving this way is what a capitalist society requires of corporate executives: "there is one and only one social responsibility of business--to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud."
Many private corporations have revenues greater than sovereign nations. Only a vigorous and well-funded government can be an adequate countervailing power against these huge private institutions. The social responsibility of government in a capitalist economy is to ensure that people are treated as persons, not as things.
Nothing is more fundamental to morality than this principle. Everyone wants to be useful, but no one wants to be "used"--treated like a thing. People who cannot respect this principle are sociopaths. Can a society that subordinates itself entirely to the profit motive respect "the sanctity of the individual"?
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