I share Mr. Cook’s favorably view of capitalism as a system, and I certainly support efforts by successful capitalists to support politicians who would constrain the system’s excesses for the benefit of all. But I do not believe an appeal to businesses to be moral “because it’s the right thing to do” will succeed absent a commitment by customers to shun those that do the wrong thing. Business is about equilibration, not self-restraint. It is society’s job to make good behavior the most profitable behavior. Individual capitalists may contribute to that effort, they should not reduce the competitiveness of their businesses in the process. Business must play to win by the rules that exist, even as they seek to change those rules so that they no longer must play by them.

To save capitalism from itself, we need to recognize the Government as a “union” of consumers who have decided what methods of competition they will not patronize. A regulation is just a mass boycott. Bans are administered as restraints on action, but, when the smoke clears, the ban has accomplished exactly what a boycott would accomplish: the company violating the rules has no customers. If we don’t want to buy from companies that discriminate in hiring, we make a rule against it and, voila, we are not buying from companies that discriminate in hiring. I’m assuming the punishment for violating a rule is severe enough not to be “just the cost of doing business.” An effective regulation prevents sales by violators because, thanks to the regulation, there are no violators.

In short, virtually every “bad” thing that companies do is the result of amoral competition, the effort to reduce costs so as to lower price to increase market share. The answer to amoral competition is moral monopsony. We, the People, in Congress assembled, need to agree among ourselves that we will not shop where bad behavior accounts for lower prices. We won’t buy from companies that hire children or adulterate products or pollute the air or poison the water.

To some extent social pressure works to effect such boycotts, and social media have made it easier to effectuate boycotts, perhaps too easy. Regulation “boycotts” are self-limiting; if the company shapes up, the boycott immediately ends. Twitter storm cancellations are not so surgically precise. Overkill is the hallmark of hotheads, whether they are Marxist politicians or SJW cancel-mongers. Businesses should work to create laws that make fierce competition serve the common good.

I support Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend, but I also believe that some form of competition is essential to the efficient creation and distribution of goods and services. Whether that’s an economy “based on production and consumption” isn’t clear to me, because “competition” is a different frame of reference. The universe creates plus-sum opportunities with negative externalities. Achieving the former while minimizing the latter (so that the net result is positive) is how we form a more perfect economy.