Putting profits above society may seem logical for corporations, but is it self-defeating?

“These guys are mad. Call off the invasion. Their system’s going to eat them so we won’t have to. They have these company things that they’re allowing to bust the whole place up. Let’s just sit tight and clean up once they’re done wrecking it.”

That’s what an alien might very well say upon looking at the way the titans of the capitalist system have been operating. You want examples? Ten years on from the financial crisis that caused a brutal recession and a lost economic decade from which we have still to fully recover and it isn’t hard to find people who’ll tell you that the banks could easily do it again.

Tech giants make money from people taking out ads that are designed to corrupt democratic elections, while other companies wreck the environment. Meanwhile, the carnival of corporate scandal adds a new float every few months. Yet according to the Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, whose influence permeates through the Anglo-Saxon capitalist world, they’re all only doing what they’re supposed to do: increasing profits by whatever means necessary within the law.