How could that ever be true? As an example: most people would prefer everything to be free, and a company would like to have a monopoly on a necessity and thus the ability to charge arbitrary prices.
Or even shorter, everyone wants to get stuff, lots of stuff without having to lift a finger.
Out of this, every company-customer relationship has to be dysfunctional.
The idea that the economy is a perfectly fair system where everyone profits equally in a transaction is a fairy tale. It completely ignores the imbalances of power inherent in social systems. In a perfectly free market, imbalances of power will be compounded over time, similar to the theory of the big bang where small imperfections of the early universe are fundamental to the large structures that follow.
> everyone wants to get stuff, lots of stuff without having to lift a finger.
We don't know how to make such a world exist. The claim is not, "if we could snap our fingers and make the world look like anything we wanted, the happiest world we could create would also be the world with the most massive profits". It's closer to, "if we want to optimise for happiness going forward from the world we have, then we should also optimise for allowing companies to make profits".
(Not to say I agree with the claim, but that particular argument is missing the point.)
I was thinking about a service like Uber, which people love, even though it's more expensive. When I take an Uber I don't complain about how I should be getting cab rides for free (although that would be nice) - I revel in how much better the experience is than waiting around for a regular cab.
Or even shorter, everyone wants to get stuff, lots of stuff without having to lift a finger.
Out of this, every company-customer relationship has to be dysfunctional.
The idea that the economy is a perfectly fair system where everyone profits equally in a transaction is a fairy tale. It completely ignores the imbalances of power inherent in social systems. In a perfectly free market, imbalances of power will be compounded over time, similar to the theory of the big bang where small imperfections of the early universe are fundamental to the large structures that follow.