In our corrupt business environment, I think many people in every sector of society and political persuasion have lost sight of something crucial: Business doesn't have to be about profit in order to make profit. In fact, until relatively recently in our history, the concept of a business whose sole purpose was the maximization of profit would have been considered borderline criminal (which it is). So even those whose only personal motive was money-making mostly tended to prefer being associated with what they created for other people - the output of their factories, for instance - than publicly wallowing in money for its own sake. They would justify the money they made by saying "Look at the wonderful things I'm able to create through profit!" and some of them were even sincere about it, and were responsible for massive economic progress. In other words, profit was often articulated as a means to progressive ends, not the end itself. There's no reason business can't return to that paradigm.
The literally for-profit corporation - a criminal machine that blindly grinds up human lives, natural environments, civil societies, and national governments toward the zero-sum benefit of a vanishingly small minority - was until about the 19th century a rarity that only occurred when an individual merchant happened to be a psychopath. The kind of activity involved was mainly limited to pirates, slave-traders, and other sorts of mercenary military raids into hapless third-world countries.
But then a new financial innovation - the public stock-traded corporation - came on the scene, and suddenly the people making the money didn't need to have any personal involvement in or even knowledge about how the money was generated. Business was allowed to become a black box into which money was put and out of which it was extracted. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the human species lives in that box, so the results have been generally (and predictably) destructive and unsustainable whenever this form of business has been ascendant: The impoverishment of consumer bases that allow mass-production to be sustained, the waste of natural resources, and the corruption of governments toward lawless / authoritarian forms.
We can call the literal for-profit business environment Degenerate Capitalism (DeCap), because it is purely destructive. If a human being's appetite for food functioned like a for-profit corporation's quest for profit, they would end up like one of those thousand-pound bed-ridden people on a tabloid cover and quickly die. If the human libido functioned like that, they would end up in prison as a rapist, and probably dying of numerous sexually-transmitted diseases. And non-rich individuals who sought profit the way that for-profit corporations do would literally be thieves, pirates, armed robbers, burglars, drug dealers, and the like. So what we see is that the publicly-traded for-profit corporation is the collectivization of sociopathy: An idea every bit as diabolical as the totalitarian state, if more insidious.
As long as you are willing to invest money in a business without caring what it does or how it does it, you may profit: Like a casino, only in this instance every spin of the wheel doesn't just bet the money of the gambler, but the livelihoods and lives of other people whom they will never have to meet. Being a product of animal evolution, human psychology finds it very difficult to resist this kind of reward: If you could push a button that would give you $1 but subject a random person somewhere in the world to a 1-in-1000 Russian roulette game, there would be a worldwide holocaust before social mechanisms could evolve to control the impulse.
As a result, this kind of economy has created a class of degenerate animals who now control the lion's share of global wealth and only a miniscule, rapidly-dwindling share of its moral values and productive motivation. These people are not the "industrialists" of earlier eras: If you were pressed to figure out what it is they do, you probably couldn't, because in fact they don't do anything other than seek profit. Like Gordon Gekko's villainous monologue describes, they create nothing - they own. They make the rules by which other people live. All benefit is accumulated to them, and all cost and negative consequence is shoved off on others. A world run on such a system would be as close to Hell as human beings could manage without going extinct, and extinction would probably follow not long afterwards anyway given the rate of environmental degradation.
And because of this DeCap system - a cancerous perversion of productive market mechanisms - many of us have started to think that this insanity is the definition of business, if not the "American Dream." But the moment we believe that, we have surrendered to the framing of life embodied by DeCap: One where you're either a predator or a member of a herd who keeps their head down and doesn't make waves - the Randian fantasy contrasting the driven, willful ubermensch with the spongelike masses. Simply making the moral decision to choose the other half of that false dilemma is no less an acceptance of a degrading and perverse narrative. The real American Dream is not being personally rich, but leaving the world a better, more hopeful, and broadly more prosperous place than you found it: To realize your potential as a creative human being.
Enter the other side of business - one that is far rarer today, but whose benefits are all the more obvious for being unusual: The by-profit corporation. By necessity, these are tightly-controlled private enterprises that don't submit majority control to the stock markets, and as such are not subject to the kind of mob pressures that debase stock-traded companies into little more than "money viruses" that treat the economy as a victim/host rather than an ecosystem. An individual business leader's personal agenda is able to wield the profits of the corporation toward ends other than just more profit.
Most of the time that potential goes unused, because most privately-held business owners just see their companies as a job - a way to make money, the same as any other job but with more perks and social status. And some business owners who do make use of their money are driven by vile personal values (e.g., the Koch brothers), but despite how obtrusive the villains are in their own times they rapidly lose relevance. The good entrepreneurs, who use their businesses to advance the state of society, are responsible for robust progress that cascades over time, while malevolent business can't do anything more than stand in the way or try to parasite off the good ones. Think about the 19th century robber-barons: Their heirs are not our rulers today, and there are no new nations or states named after them. The only things that remain of them are the good things they left behind, either by design, as an afterthought, or unintentionally - a bicoastal nation, railroads, philanthropic foundations bequeathed as vanity projects, and regulatory policies that evolved to fight the worst criminal abuses of their industrial empires.
And the ones who set out from the beginning to achieve something productive and lasting contributed even more: Henry Ford's assembly line for the affordable automobile, staffed with workers he deliberately paid enough to buy the products they made despite market wages being far lower, that mobilized a nation and laid the early industrial ground for America's WW2 defense, commercial aviation, and everything else that has come out of it. Jobs and Wozniak "thinking differently" and bringing about the personal computer revolution and everything that has flowed from it, then coming back for the Godfather II-like sequel where they reinvented the mobile phone and brought tablet computing to fruition. Bill Gates et al showing the world the mass-market potential of software. The Google people spreading the value of IT abstractions into every facet of life and productivity. On and on.
Probably the most potent example of the by-profit corporation today are the duo of world-changing businesses started and run by Elon Musk: Rocket and spaceship company SpaceX and EV maker Tesla Motors. If Musk had merely wanted to make money, there are far easier and more secure ways to do it than to revolutionize spaceflight and the automobile. In fact, those are virtually guaranteed ways to lose money if not go completely bankrupt - which he almost did. In both businesses, he reached critical points where he had to sink every last dime of money at his disposal into keeping them alive, and even borrow money for his own rent.
A for-profit entrepreneur would have just cut his losses at that point and done something else, but neither SpaceX nor Tesla exists to make money - they make money to exist, and if unprofitable means are sometimes necessary to keep them going and making progress, then Musk has proven himself willing to take those measures. As by-profit corporations, they are instituted and operated to harness the power of capitalism for means other than capitalism, and Musk's tight personal control of both businesses allows him to keep this standard in place. If he wanted to, he could easily increase his short-term profits by a massive margin by outsourcing suppliers, subcontracting, and all the various other myopic tactics used by DeCap to maximize profit at the expense of real productivity. Instead, he keeps these firms vertically integrated and reinvests their profits in continuous technological and logistical evolution.
This is how private enterprise is supposed to work: Profit is supposed to be a means to benefit society, not the definition of desirability against which all actions are measured. Elon Musk is not superhuman, so obviously something is very wrong if the things he is achieving by doing what seems like common sense in retrospect creates far better results than anything else going on in the world today. What if more businesspeople emulated Musk's philosophy instead of being Wall Street-school MBA zombies? What if more people started by figuring out what they want money to do, and then created a business around that instead of treating money like a god that everything else has to serve?
Money serving beer makes the numerous delicious craft breweries that have sprung up in recent years, while beer serving money makes the degenerate Coors empire that corrupted Colorado politics for decades and the rest of the generic piss-tasting brands on the market. Money serving the automobile is responsible for Tesla, while the automobile serving money wasted decades deliberately sabotaging EV technology and pushing gas-guzzling monster-truck SUVs on the American public and now still mostly offers pathetic, poorly-designed, ugly-looking toy cars for people who want better mileage. You get the idea: When money is made to be the servant of humanity rather than the master, the results are awesome no matter what category of product or service you're talking about, and when it's allowed to rule every decision the results are utter shit.
In summary, there will always be a lot of cretinous characters who want nothing more than to own everything and lord it over everyone else, just like there will always be a lot more viruses and bacteria than human beings, and yet humanity persists, grows, and evolves. Business doesn't have to be part of the problem, and we should stop letting it off the hook by accepting the premise that it does. We should point to Elon Musk and demand to know why other businesses aren't run like his, and why other business leaders aren't like him. We should demand to know why the largest producers of a thing can't also be the best and highest quality, as well as the most progressive employers and socially responsible institutions, because we know for a fact they can. And more fundamentally, we should demand of ourselves that we not be part of the problem, and not base consumer decisions entirely on price when we have any choice about it. In other words, we can take the first step toward a rigorously by-profit business culture by being by-profit consumers.