Do you think there are services or industries that should be beyond the reach of being for profit? Why or why not?
Two different questions here.
Are there businesses that shouldn't be for profit businesses. And the question of excess profits for some businesses.
There are business sectors that don't lend themselves to being a for profit. The for profit motive is a very simple, straight forward one. It channels greed and selfishness into producing the goods and services that we need. The effectiveness of the model to produce what we need depends on how closely the pursuit of profits aligns with the needs of society.
The for profit model works well for production of consumer goods and services. The way to maximize profits producing consumer goods is to make high quality, low cost goods, exactly what society needs.
On the other hand there are things that society needs where the profit motive doesn't align with the needs of society. An obvious one is adjudication, the courts and the justice system. Another is policing and the operation of prisons. Another would be the defense of the country.
These for different reasons are best handled by government. It basically breaks down to capitalism handles the straight forward problems handled by the simple mechanism of the single target of making a profit. The government handles the more complex problems where there is conflict and there has to be balance between competing interests.
The problem comes up in the gray areas in between. An obvious one is health care. Society needs widely available, high quality, low cost health care. The profit motive doesn't always provide this. Drug companies, for example, make the most profit by coming up with drugs that relieve the symptoms of chronic diseases that a large number of people have. Drugs that cure diseases or prevent diseases are not very profitable. Obviously drugs to treat rare diseases aren't either. A great deal of time and money is spent on promoting drugs. The cornerstone of the health care system is the professionalism and the judgement of the doctors, this promotion is an attempt to get around this. It works against the needs of society.
There is an easy way to tell which sectors of the economy are less amenable to the for profit model. Simply look at how much regulation has to be done to force the profit motive to provide for the needs of society. The more regulation that exists, the more we should be looking for a non-profit alternative
The FIRE sector, finance, insurance and real estate' is a special case. These are part of the mechanism of capitalism. They don't produce products that society needs, they exist as part of the mechanism to encourage others to produce, to grease the wheels of capitalism. Banks for example are granted the power to create money by making loans. The stock markets raise the capital to build production facilities and to buy the capital machines to produce product for consumption. Insurance companies spread out the risk to reduce and normalize it for the individual. Capitalism requires that many things have a dollar value assigned so that they are utilized most effectively, real estate does this.
But while these are necessary functions they are part of the overhead of the economy. They add cost to everything that is done in society. A smart society minimizes these costs,
Money and all of the money like things, stocks and bonds, are not real wealth of a nation..Real wealth is in the natural resources, the production facilities and most importantly the human capital of a country. The FIRE sector is part of the mechanism and is not a producer of real wealth itself. The only way to evaluate it is not in how much profit it makes but how much real wealth it helps to create, how many natural resources are uncovered, how many production facilities are built and how much human capital is gained.
