Markets and Profits Are About More Than Efficiency
The Loveatarian Newsletter
Open almost any argument about business and you meet the same tired picture. A company exists to chase profit. To chase profit, it cuts corners. It squeezes workers, thins out the product, and treats customers as marks to be fooled. Profit, in this picture, is the reward a firm wins by being a little meaner than the next firm. Many people carry this image around without ever testing it.
I want to take that picture apart. Not with slogans, but with the way real enterprises work and the reasons they survive. The honest version of the story is far more human and far more hopeful. A profit is not a trophy for cruelty. It is a quiet signal that a group of people has found a way to cooperate, produce, and communicate well enough to keep going. Read that way, the pursuit of profit pushes companies to get better at the very things that make peaceful life possible.
This matters beyond accounting. The skills a business sharpens to earn a profit are the same skills that calm a society down. People who learn to persuade rather than command, to cooperate rather than coerce, carry those habits into the rest of life. So the question of what profit really rewards is not a dry economics question. It touches how gentle or how violent a community becomes.
The Caricature Worth Retiring
Start with the charge that seeking profit means being anti-consumer. The claim sounds plausible. A firm that wants more money would seem to want to give you less for it. Yet the math runs the other way for almost every business that lasts.
A customer hands over money for one reason. The customer expects the thing bought to be worth more than the money given up. That is the whole basis of a voluntary trade. Both sides walk away believing they came out ahead, or the trade does not happen. A firm that tricks a customer once may pocket a sale. A firm that tricks customers as a habit loses them. Word spreads. Rivals pounce. The con does not scale.
The data on business survival makes this concrete. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks how long new firms last. About one in five private sector businesses fail within the first year. Close to half fail within five years, and roughly 65 percent are gone within ten (BLS data summarized by LendingTree, 2026). Running a business is hard, and most do not survive a decade. A company that treats its customers as enemies starts that brutal race with a stone in its shoe.
The anti-consumer story also misreads what cutting corners costs. Corners cut in plain sight drive customers away. Corners cut in secret invite scandal, recalls, and lawsuits. A firm can win for a season by being cheap and nasty. It rarely wins for a generation. The companies that endure tend to be the ones that solved a real problem for real people, again and again, at a price those people were glad to pay.
None of this means firms are saints. Some do cheat. Some do harm. The point is narrower and more useful. Profit, by itself, does not reward cheating. Over any stretch of time, profit rewards trust. A business earns repeat money by being worth coming back to.
Profit Is a Signal, Not a Prize
Here is the idea I most want to land. A profit is a signal of the sustainability of an enterprise at this moment. It tells you that the value a firm created last quarter came in higher than the cost of creating it. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Yes, shareholders want profit to grow their wealth. That is real and worth saying plainly. People invest their savings and want a return. But strip the shareholders away and the need for profit does not vanish. A worker cooperative needs it. A family shop needs it. A nonprofit hospital needs it, even if it calls the gap a surplus. Without revenue above cost, an enterprise cannot pay wages next month. It cannot restock shelves, repair machines, or answer the phone. No profit, no payroll. The signal is about staying alive.
Friedrich Hayek explained the deeper logic in a 1945 paper called “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” published in the American Economic Review. Hayek asked how an economy can function when no single person knows more than a sliver of what is going on. His answer was prices. A change in a price carries news. It tells a buyer in one corner of the world that something shifted in a far corner, without the buyer needing to know the cause. Hayek used the example of tin. If tin grows scarce, its price rises, and thousands of people who have never met start using less of it and hunting for substitutes. No committee ordered the change. The price did the work of a million memos.
Hayek admired this so much that he said if people had designed the price system on purpose, and grasped what it did, they would hail it as one of “the greatest triumphs of the human mind” (Hayek, 1945). Profit and loss are the same idea aimed at the firm itself. A profit says the firm is using scarce resources to make something people value more than the inputs cost. A loss says the opposite. Resources are being burned to make something worth less than its parts. The loss is a polite request to stop and try a different way.
This is the part the caricature misses. Profit is not mainly about hoarding. It is mainly about feedback. It is the market telling a group of people, week after week, whether their way of cooperating still serves anyone. Take that signal away and you get the long, expensive failures of central planning, where bad ideas ran for decades with no number to flag the waste.
The loss side of the signal deserves equal billing, and people almost always forget it. A market that lets firms earn profits must let them suffer losses too, or the signal means nothing. A loss is not a moral failing. It is information, often the most useful kind. It tells a founder that the world has changed, that a once good product no longer earns its keep, that the resources tied up in this effort would do more good somewhere else. A firm free to fail is a firm that releases its workers, its buildings, and its capital back into the pool for better uses. The economist Joseph Schumpeter called this creative destruction, the steady churn by which new ways of serving people replace old ones. The churn hurts in the moment and gives back over time. The horse stable gave way to the garage. The video rental store gave way to the streaming service. Each loss freed people to do something the world wanted more.
This is why a society that props up every failing firm slowly grinds to a halt. Profit without the possibility of loss is not a signal at all. It is a subsidy. The pain of loss is the price of the information, and that information is what keeps an economy honest about where human effort should go.
It helps to see how thin the signal usually is. People imagine firms swimming in profit. The real margins are modest. Across the S&P 500, the net profit margin has run near 12 to 13 percent in recent quarters, with a ten year average closer to 10.8 percent (FactSet, 2025 to 2026). For every dollar of revenue these large companies take in, about 13 cents reaches the bottom line, and that is the high end of the last three decades (Plante Moran, 2025). Smaller firms keep far less. The other 87 cents went to workers, suppliers, landlords, lenders, and the taxman. A profit is a sliver, not a feast. It is the thin margin that keeps the whole arrangement standing.
So when someone says a company “only cares about profit,” they have said something stranger than they think. They have said the company cares about staying able to do what it does. A person who only cared about breathing would still need to eat, sleep, and avoid traffic. Profit is the breathing. It is necessary, and it is not the point.
An Enterprise Is a System of Cooperation
Now widen the lens. What is a firm, really? Strip away the logo and the office, and a firm is a standing agreement among people to cooperate in a particular way. Strangers agree to show up, pool their skills, and split the proceeds, day after day. That is a remarkable thing, and it is not the default state of human life.
Ronald Coase asked the obvious question that few had asked. If markets are so good at coordinating people through prices, why do firms exist at all? Why is the economy not just a swarm of individuals signing fresh contracts for every task? His answer came in a 1937 paper, “The Nature of the Firm,” published in Economica. Using the market is not free. It costs time and effort to find the right person, learn the right price, haggle over terms, write the contract, and check that the work got done. Coase called these the costs of using the price mechanism.
A firm exists to cut those costs. Inside a firm, you do not renegotiate with your coworker every morning. One standing relationship replaces a thousand little bargains. Coase put it cleanly: a worker inside a firm does not sign a separate contract with each colleague, as would be needed if the cooperation ran through the price system alone (Coase, 1937). The firm is a pocket of planned cooperation floating in a sea of market trade. It grows until the cost of organizing one more task inside beats the cost of buying that task outside.
This reframes the whole subject. A company is not a money machine with people bolted on. It is a structure for getting humans to work together toward a shared end. The profit is the score that tells the structure whether the cooperation is paying off. So a firm that wants more profit, over time, must get better at the underlying human task. It must find better ways for people to cooperate, produce, and communicate. The money chases the cooperation, not the other way around.
Once you see firms this way, the competition between them changes character. It is not only a fight over who has the cheapest widget. It is a contest over who has found the best way to organize people. That contest plays out on three fronts, and each one rewards a skill that a peaceful society needs more of.
They Compete on How People Work Together
The first front is internal. Firms compete on building the best systems for operating and cooperating inside the enterprise.
This is the quiet competition the public almost never sees. Two companies can sell the same product at the same price and still pull apart over years, for reasons that live entirely inside the building. One firm has clear roles, fast decisions, and people who trust each other enough to disagree in the open. The other drowns in meetings, hoards information, and lets small grudges fester into turf wars. The first firm spends its energy on customers. The second spends its energy on itself.
Coase’s logic explains why this matters to the bottom line. Every act of internal coordination has a cost. A clumsy company pays that cost over and over. Decisions stall. Work gets redone. Good people quit. Each delay is money, and each is a small failure of cooperation. A company that designs better ways for people to work together lowers those costs and frees up resources to serve the outside world.
The methods are endless and always changing. Firms experiment with how teams are sized, how pay is set, how authority is shared, how mistakes are handled. They borrow from each other, copy what works, and drop what does not. A practice that saves one firm a fortune spreads to its rivals within a few years, then to other industries, then into the wider culture of how people manage shared work. The assembly line, the quality circle, the daily standup, the open ledger: all of them started as one firm’s gamble and became common knowledge.
Consider one famous case. In 1913, Ford built the first moving assembly line for cars, and the next year it doubled its workers’ pay to five dollars a day. Critics called the high wage reckless. It was a hard nosed bet on cooperation. Turnover at the plant had been savage, and every worker who quit took training and momentum out the door. The higher wage cut that churn, steadied the line, and let the whole system run. Rivals watched, learned, and followed. The lesson outlived the company that taught it. A method born in one factory reshaped how a whole country thought about the link between fair pay and steady work. That is the pattern. A firm chasing its own survival stumbles onto a better way to treat people, the profit signal rewards it, and the discovery escapes into the common stock of human knowledge where everyone can use it.
Look at what is being rewarded. The firms that win this front are the ones that learn to coordinate human beings with less friction and less command. That is not a trivial skill. It is one of the hardest things people ever try to do, and the profit signal pays them to keep getting better at it. A society full of organizations that have learned to cooperate smoothly is a calmer society than one where every shared task ends in a shouting match.
They Compete on Cutting Through Noise
The second front is communication. Firms compete in marketing by building channels and methods that cut through cognitive dissonance and the biases that crowd a busy mind.
This front gets the worst reputation, and it deserves a closer look. The cynical view says marketing is manipulation, a way to trick people into wanting what they do not need. Some marketing earns that scorn. But the deeper function of marketing is older and more honest. It is the work of telling people that something useful exists, and helping them believe it.
George Stigler made the case in a 1961 paper, “The Economics of Information,” in the Journal of Political Economy. Stigler pointed out a fact so ordinary that economists had ignored it: information is costly. A buyer does not automatically know who sells what, at what price, at what quality. Finding out takes time and effort, and most people have little of either to spare. Stigler treated the search for information as an economic activity in its own right, with real costs and real payoffs. In that frame, advertising stops looking like a trick and starts looking like a tool against ignorance. It is, in Stigler’s account, a powerful way to spread knowledge of who sells what, paid for by the seller (Stigler, 1961).
The hard part is that human minds resist new information. We cling to what we already believe. We discount messages that clash with our habits. Psychologists have catalogued these tendencies for decades, from confirmation bias to the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. A firm with a genuinely better product faces a wall of inattention and doubt. Getting past that wall is not cheap and it is not easy. It is a craft.
So firms compete to communicate well. They test which words land. They build trust through consistency. They learn which channels reach which people, and how to earn a moment of belief from a skeptical stranger. The firms that master this can take a real improvement and actually deliver the news of it to the people it would help. The firms that fail at it watch good products die in silence.
That last point is not a guess. A widely cited study of startup post mortems by CB Insights found that the single most common reason founders gave for failure was no market need, named in about 42 percent of cases (CB Insights, summarized by Commerce Institute, 2025). Read that carefully. Some of those products were bad. But many were fine products that never found the people who wanted them, or never managed to make those people believe. Good ideas fail from bad communication. The market punishes that failure, and in punishing it, pushes the whole society to communicate better.
There is a deeper reason honest communication earns money, and it runs straight to consumer protection. George Akerlof showed in a 1970 paper, “The Market for Lemons,” that when buyers cannot tell good products from bad, the bad can drive out the good. Buyers refuse to pay full price for quality they cannot verify, so quality sellers leave, and the market sinks toward junk (Akerlof, 1970). The cure is credible communication. A firm that can prove its quality, through a warranty, a brand, a track record, or a reputation it would hate to lose, rescues the honest trade that would otherwise collapse. Phillip Nelson refined the idea by sorting goods into those a buyer can judge before purchase and those a buyer learns only by use. For the second kind, a firm’s standing investment in its own name is the signal that it expects you to come back. Marketing, in this light, is not a layer of deception over a product. It is the mechanism by which good products survive a world of doubt. The firms that build trust win, and the consumer is the one protected by their winning.
This is the part I find quietly beautiful. The Lovatarian view holds that better communication is one of the great peacemakers. People who can persuade do not need to compel. A culture that rewards clear, honest, trust building communication is a culture slowly learning to settle differences with words. Marketing, at its best and shorn of its worst, is millions of dollars a year spent on the problem of how to change a mind without force. That problem is the central problem of a free society.
They Compete for People
The third front is talent. Firms compete to attract people who are hard to get, and to build a workplace that draws them in and deepens the firm’s cooperative culture.
A firm is its people. The cleverest strategy on paper means nothing without the hands and minds to carry it out. So companies fight for talent. The phrase “war for talent” comes from McKinsey researchers in the late 1990s, and the contest has only sharpened since. A great engineer, a gifted manager, a salesperson who tells the truth: these people have choices. They do not have to work anywhere in particular. To win them, a firm must offer more than money.
Here the three fronts fold into one. Talented people want to work where the cooperation is good. They want clear purpose, fair treatment, room to do their best work, and colleagues they respect. A firm with a toxic culture can buy people for a time, then watch them leave the moment a better offer appears. A firm with a healthy culture keeps people through hard times and attracts more of the kind it already has. Culture compounds.
So profit, traced back far enough, pays firms to treat people well. The motive is not charity, welcome as charity is. The driver is the plain fact that good people are scarce and they vote with their feet. The competition for talent rewards the companies that build places worth staying in. Over time, that competition lifts the floor on how workers expect to be treated, and the firms that lag behind lose the race for the people who could have saved them.
Think about what this competition teaches the rest of us. It rewards respect, fairness, and trust as practical assets, not just moral nice to haves. A boss who learns that respect retains talent has learned something a tyrant never learns. The market is a slow, patient teacher of the lesson that people work best when they are treated as people. That lesson, carried home, makes families and neighborhoods gentler too.
Three Skills That Build a Civilization
Step back and the shape becomes clear. An enterprise is a system of cooperation, production, and communication. It aims to improve on all three fronts at once, so it can outcompete other enterprises. Cooperation inside. Production of real value. Communication outward and inward. The profit signal tells the firm whether the whole machine is gaining or slipping.
Now picture thousands of these systems competing year after year. Each is running an experiment in how to get people to work together, make useful things, and share the news. The winners spread their methods. The losers free up their people and resources for better uses. The stock of human know how on all three fronts keeps rising. We learn better ways to cooperate. We learn better ways to produce. We learn better ways to communicate. This learning does not sit in a vault. It moves. It moves through workers who change jobs, through founders who start fresh companies, through books and courses and copied habits.
This is how markets create prosperity, and the prosperity is real. But I want to press on a second effect that gets far less attention. The skills sharpened by commerce are peace skills. Learning to cooperate without coercion. Learning to communicate across difference. Learning to win people over rather than force them. These are exactly the habits that let humans resolve conflict without violence.
A society that practices these skills millions of times a day, in millions of transactions, is rehearsing peace. Every honest sale is a small act of mutual consent. Every successful team is proof that strangers can cooperate for gain. Every persuasive ad that does not lie is a tiny victory of words over force. None of this is guaranteed, and none of it is automatic. But the direction is real. Commerce, done well, trains a people in the arts of getting along.
From Commerce to a Calmer World
This is not a new idea. It runs back through some of the clearest minds in the liberal tradition. They called it doux commerce, the notion that trade softens manners and inclines people toward peace.
Montesquieu put it most famously in The Spirit of the Laws in 1748. He wrote that “Peace is the natural effect of trade,” and argued that two nations bound by exchange come to depend on each other in ways that make war costly and foolish (Montesquieu, 1748). Trade, in his view, was a cure for harsh prejudice. It forced people who might otherwise despise each other to deal fairly, keep promises, and find common ground in mutual gain. Thomas Paine made a similar claim, arguing that commerce, given free rein, would work against the whole system of war.
Immanuel Kant carried the thought into his 1795 essay Perpetual Peace. He held that the spirit of commerce cannot coexist with war for long, and that the financial interests woven between trading nations push rulers toward peace whether they like it or not. The merchant who has built a market across a border does not want that border to burn.
Modern scholars have tested the claim with data, and the picture is mixed but real. Researchers in the capitalist peace tradition, including Erik Weede and Erik Gartzke, have found that trade ties, market institutions, and shared prosperity tend to lower the odds of war between countries. Gartzke’s 2007 paper “The Capitalist Peace,” in the American Journal of Political Science, argued that economic freedom and financial interdependence do real work in keeping the peace, sometimes more than democracy alone. The link is not iron. A ruler gripped by nationalist fury can still march his country into ruin against its own interests, and history offers grim examples. But the pull of commerce toward peace is a steady pressure, and steady pressure shapes outcomes over time.
The Lovatarian reading goes one layer deeper than the trade statistics. It is not only that trading partners avoid war to protect their profits, true as that is. It is that the daily practice of commerce builds the cultural muscles that peace requires. A people skilled at cooperation, persuasion, and honest dealing has less use for the gun. Coercion and violence destroy information and hurt people, as Hayek’s whole body of work suggests. A culture that has learned to get what it wants through consent has learned to want the gun less. Markets, working well, are quietly teaching that lesson all day long.
So the case for free exchange is not only that it makes us richer. It does make us richer. The deeper point is that it makes us better at the things that keep us from each other’s throats. Prosperity and peace grow from the same root, which is the practiced habit of voluntary cooperation among people who do not have to agree on anything but the terms of a trade.
When the Signal Gets Corrupted
I have made the hopeful case, and I believe it. But honesty requires the hard part. Markets do not always advance cooperation, production, and communication. Sometimes they reward the opposite. The corruption almost always starts the same way: an industry stops competing for customers and starts competing for the government’s favor.
Economists have a name for this. They call it rent seeking. Gordon Tullock laid out the idea in a 1967 paper on the welfare costs of tariffs, monopolies, and theft, and Anne Krueger gave it the name in a 1974 paper, “The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society,” in the American Economic Review. The definition is simple and damning. Rent seeking is spending resources to grab a larger slice of existing wealth, rather than spending resources to create new wealth (Tullock, 1967, and Krueger, 1974). A firm that lobbies for a tariff to hobble a rival is rent seeking. A firm that wins a subsidy, a license requirement that blocks newcomers, or a rule written to fit only its own products is rent seeking. Every dollar spent this way is a dollar not spent making anything better.
The waste is larger than it looks. Krueger studied real economies and found the rents enormous. In Turkey in the late 1960s, she estimated that rents from import licenses alone ran near 15 percent of the country’s gross national product (Krueger, 1974). That is a vast pool of reward sitting in the political arena, waiting for whoever can capture it. And the capture itself burns resources. Tullock’s insight was that firms will spend up to the full value of a privilege to win it, pouring lawyers, lobbyists, and favors into a contest that produces nothing for anyone outside the deal.
George Stigler showed how the capture works in practice. His 1971 paper, “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” in the Bell Journal, started from a blunt premise: the government’s defining resource is the power to coerce (Stigler, 1971). A well organized industry will work to point that coercive power at its own rivals and customers. The rules meant to protect the public get written, over time, to protect the incumbents. Stigler pointed to air travel under the old Civil Aeronautics Board, where regulated interstate flights cost far more per mile than unregulated flights within a single state. The regulation was sold as safety and order. It functioned as a shield for established airlines against competition.
There is a grim twist that makes capture worse than it first appears. The reward from a captured rule can dwarf the cost of winning it. Tullock noted that a firm might gain millions from a favorable law and spend only a fraction of that on the lobbying to get it. Scholars call this the Tullock paradox: the prizes are huge and the bribes are cheap (Tullock, summarized by Wall Street Oasis, 2025). That gap is an open invitation. It tells every industry that the highest return on a dollar may not be a better factory or a kinder workplace. It may be a quiet meeting in a capital city. A firm that learns this lesson stops pouring its best minds into serving customers and starts pouring them into working the rule book.
The cost lands on people who never see it. A licensing rule that blocks newcomers raises the price of a haircut, a taxi, a casket, a cup of poured concrete. A tariff written for one industry taxes every family that buys the protected good. None of these costs show up as a scandal. They hide inside ordinary prices, spread thin across millions of people, each paying a little so a concentrated few can collect a lot. That is the cruel genius of rent seeking. The harm is diffuse and the gain is concentrated, so the few who profit fight hard to keep it and the many who pay barely notice they are paying.
Watch what happens to the three fronts once an industry slips into this cycle. It no longer needs to compete on internal cooperation. A captured rule protects it from the cost of its own clumsiness. It no longer needs to communicate honestly with customers. They have nowhere else to go. It no longer needs to attract the best people. It does not need to be good at all. The profit it earns stops being a signal of value created. It becomes a tax extracted by force, with the government’s coercive power standing behind it. The same word, profit, now means the opposite thing. The signal has been corrupted.
This is the crucial distinction the caricature of business misses, and so do many of its defenders. There is a profit earned by serving people well in open competition, and there is a profit seized by capturing the state’s power to coerce. The first is the engine of prosperity and peace I have described. The second is a slow poison. It rewards the very behaviors, the cornering and the cheating and the contempt for customers, that open competition punishes. The anti consumer business everyone fears is real. It tends to live behind a wall built by lobbyists, not out in the open market where customers can walk away.
So the Lovatarian is not naive about business. The Lovatarian is precise about it. We do not cheer profit as such. We cheer the kind of profit that signals value freely given and freely received. And we watch with care for the moment an industry stops earning that signal and starts buying it from the government instead. That moment is when a market turns from a school of cooperation into a machine for extraction.
Keeping the Engine Honest
What follows from all this? Not a demand to worship corporations, and not a fantasy that markets are perfect. The Lovatarian lens asks for something steadier. Protect the conditions that let profit mean what it should mean.
That means guarding the open door. The health of a market lives in the freedom to enter it. A new firm with a better way of cooperating, producing, or communicating has to be allowed to try, and to win customers from the old firms if it earns them. Every rule that locks newcomers out, no matter how kindly it is described, weakens the signal and tilts the field toward rent seeking. The most pro consumer policy is rarely a new mandate. It is the removal of a barrier that protected someone from competition.
It means telling the true story about profit, the one I have tried to tell here. People who believe profit is a reward for cruelty will support policies that punish the cruelty they imagine and end up shielding the cruelty that is real. People who understand profit as a fragile signal of sustained cooperation will defend the open competition that keeps it honest. The story we tell shapes the rules we accept.
And it means carrying the commercial virtues into the rest of life. The habits that earn a profit in an open market are good habits anywhere. Cooperate without commanding. Persuade without lying. Treat scarce and valuable people with respect. Solve a real problem for someone and let them decide whether you solved it. These are not just business tactics. They are the working manners of a free and peaceful people, and the market rewards them every single day for anyone paying attention.
The cynic looks at commerce and sees greed dressed up. The Lovatarian looks at the same scene and sees something more interesting. Millions of people, most of whom will never meet, cooperating through consent rather than command, learning year by year to do it better, and carrying those lessons home. The profit is just the scoreboard. The real game is the slow, patient, voluntary work of getting along.
Markets and profits are about more than efficiency. They are about the discovery, again and again, of how human beings can live and work together without forcing each other. That discovery makes us richer. It also makes us kinder. Both are worth defending, and both depend on keeping the engine honest enough that profit still means what it is supposed to mean: not a trophy taken, but a trust earned.
Sources
Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review, 1945. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hayek-the-use-of-knowledge-in-society-1945
Ronald H. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica, 1937. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x
George J. Stigler, “The Economics of Information,” Journal of Political Economy, 1961. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/economics-econometrics-and-finance/economics-of-information
George Akerlof, “The Market for Lemons,” 1970, and Phillip Nelson on search and experience goods, as discussed in Advances in Consumer Research. https://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/6816/volumes/v15/na-15
George J. Stigler, “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” Bell Journal of Economics, 1971, as discussed in ProMarket. https://www.promarket.org/2021/05/20/george-stiglers-lesson-regulatory-capture-rent-seeking/
Gordon Tullock, “The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft,” Western Economic Journal, 1967, and Anne Krueger, “The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society,” American Economic Review, 1974, summarized at Econlib. https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentSeeking.html
The Tullock paradox and the low cost of lobbying, summarized by Wall Street Oasis, 2025. https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/resources/skills/economics/rent-seeking
Montesquieu on commerce and peace, The Spirit of the Laws, 1748, and the doux commerce tradition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doux_commerce
Capitalist peace research, including Erik Gartzke, “The Capitalist Peace,” American Journal of Political Science, 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_peace_theory
S&P 500 net profit margin data, FactSet Earnings Insight, 2025 to 2026. https://insight.factset.com/sp-500-reporting-highest-net-profit-margin-in-more-than-15-years
S&P 500 margin context, Plante Moran, 2025. https://www.plantemoran.com/explore-our-thinking/insight/2025/01/higher-stock-market-valuations
U.S. business survival and failure rates, BLS data summarized by LendingTree and Commerce Institute, 2025 to 2026. https://www.lendingtree.com/business/small/failure-rate/
Startup failure reasons, CB Insights post mortems, summarized by Commerce Institute. https://www.commerceinstitute.com/business-failure-rate/
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