"People in business pursue the profit-maximizing choice, which at its worst means providing something unique enough that you can charge a monopolistic price."
You're assuming they're bound by laws and aren't willing to subvert them to make a profit. At their worst, people in business have done a whole lot worse.
>At their worst, people in business have done a whole lot worse.
I challenge you to show me a single non-governmental entity that has done anything as bad as the Great Leap Forward, the Holocaust, the slayings of the Khmer Rouge, the starving of the Ukraine, etc. You aren't really competing with government in the killing-people field until you do it by the millions.
There are two ways to subvert the laws. One way is to take a rule that arbitrary parties would agree to in advance (e.g. "If a car belongs to A, B can't just drive off in it without being penalized"). The other set of laws involves taking some government program (whether of the 'shoot at people in the Third World' or the 'write a check to people who are doing some particular kind of good' variety) and subvert it to maximize profits.
You don't stay in business very long if you violate A, and you can only do B when the government is rich enough to rob.
You're assuming they're bound by laws and aren't willing to subvert them to make a profit. At their worst, people in business have done a whole lot worse.