Well, what you said is entirely true...from the perspective of someone using their imagination to form their world view.
In the world I can observe, business is neither inherently good or inherently evil. It tends to take on the morality or immorality of its owners and directors. I'll leave it to the reader to decide what kind of people tend to rise into those positions, and thus what kind of morality their businesses assume. Business is motivated by all kinds of incentives not necessarily related to "lower prices". Left unchecked, without guidance from the general public, those incentives will always converge on "profiting and growing" to the exclusion of everything else. I don't think this view requires imagination, but happy to be shown otherwise.
> Business is motivated by all kinds of incentives not necessarily related to "lower prices"
I would posit that business is virtually never motivated by "lower prices" and always motivated by "profiting and growing". Not that profiting and growing is inherently evil, but I think the idea that businesses strive to lower prices for consumers is truly fantasy.
At its best, business provides a utility for exchange thats worth more than the sum of its parts, by specializing and scaling. At its worst, business grows large and powerful enough to control all access to that utility, and becomes an abuser of that power.
This is the same for government. The worst is when both work purely for power together - the pharmaceutical industry being one, the military industrial complex being another. I frequently see people who advocate for smaller government be fine with absolutely abusive industry, thinking that with less government (IE regulation) the industry will fix itself. I don't think this is the case, since you're not really addressing the power disparity. The same can be true with industry - making industry smaller (anti-trust) won't fix the government.
Well, what you said is entirely true...from the perspective of someone using their imagination to form their world view.
In the world I can observe, business is neither inherently good or inherently evil. It tends to take on the morality or immorality of its owners and directors. I'll leave it to the reader to decide what kind of people tend to rise into those positions, and thus what kind of morality their businesses assume. Business is motivated by all kinds of incentives not necessarily related to "lower prices". Left unchecked, without guidance from the general public, those incentives will always converge on "profiting and growing" to the exclusion of everything else. I don't think this view requires imagination, but happy to be shown otherwise.