To stop starving its population, China embraced capitalist ideas: leveraging self-interest, creating jobs, and allowing for income inequality. This paradoxical move by a communist regime serves as powerful evidence that capitalism is the most effective tool for pulling masses out of poverty.

The need for a separate 'social mission' implies the core business of solving customer problems isn't inherently valuable. This mindset stems from a 'push' view of capitalism. In a 'pull' model, unblocking customers *is* the social mission, making an appended one redundant and distracting.

Capitalism's fundamental mechanism isn't just supply and demand, but a system that incentivizes individuals to identify and solve the problems ('blocks') of others. This 'unblocking' process, repeated at scale, is the direct cause of societal progress and innovation.

Sir Ronald Cohen suggests that economic systems like communism fail because they suppress the natural human instinct to strive. The goal should not be to eliminate capitalism's encouragement of striving, but to evolve it by redirecting that powerful drive toward achieving both financial profit and positive societal impact.

In a competitive free market, corporate greed is a positive force. The desire for profit maximization compels companies to offer better products and services at lower prices than their rivals to win customers' money. This "greed" directly translates into improved value and a higher standard of living for consumers.

Accepting the premise that capitalism is inherently flawed allows bad actors to justify exploitative practices by saying, 'don't hate the player, hate the game.' This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, separating personal morality from business practices and enabling behavior that doesn't serve customers.

The current model of capitalism prioritizes profit above all. A more sustainable and just version would reorder the priorities: first, advance a greater cause; second, protect the people and places you operate in; and third, generate profit as the means to continue the first two indefinitely.

The same principle that drives a customer to buy a product—being "blocked" from a goal and "pulling" in a new solution—operates at a macroeconomic scale. This fractal concept suggests that understanding the micro-level buying decision is key to understanding broad economic progress.

Markets work because individuals value the same things differently, enabling transactions where both parties feel they have won. Understanding this principle of subjective value is the antidote to zero-sum thinking (like Marxism) which assumes value is objective and one person's gain must be another's loss.