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maximising profits to the point your company goes broke is generally seen as bad business and thus bad for capitalism

im not quite sure where it says in the rules of capitalism to extract all available value out of a good product until it is no longer good



It says so under "rational actions for capital owner", along with "Friedman Doctrine" in business ethics (often mistaken for an actual law). A company/factory/workers are just a constraint, a limitation, a problem to be worked around, in the capitalist mode of production where the capitalist (owner of capital) tries to increase said capital.

If the capitalist can bleed an entity dry, then use the profits to spin up and dry another entity, resulting in higher wealth increase over the same time than setting up stable long-lived company, then it's the rational action to do as owner of capital.

When you repackage and dilute ownership enough, you end up with ultimate investor having simple desire of profit from shares they hold in an intermediary, and said intermediary then trying to squeeze those profits out of portfolio of entities. In absence of any other constraint, the rational action is then to increase short-term profit while reducing long-term risk - for example by dropping the involvement before the harvest of sown risks comes by.




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