I am a bad capitalist, and I have no intention of getting better at it.

I leave money on the table. I pay people more than I have to. I shut things down early sometimes because I want to watch my ducks splash around in their pond and quack amongst themselves. The “bad capitalist” phrase is not mine; I picked it up from Wajahat Ali, who uses the same label on his Substack with the same shrug. The idea is simple enough: if the system says you are failing because you are not squeezing hard enough, the system is the problem, not you.

But being a bad capitalist is not just a personal choice; it has to be structural, because you cannot trust that people will do the right thing through self-regulation. The system is designed to reward the opposite. The moment it becomes more profitable to cut corners than to hold the line, somebody will cut the corners. Not everybody, but enough.

Foxes and henhouses

This is not a hypothetical. Upton Sinclair wrote about it in 1906. “The Jungle” exposed what happens when the meatpacking industry polices itself: contaminated meat and chemicals to hide the smell. The outrage produced the first real federal food safety laws in this country.

Here we are, 120 years later, and the food recalls read like a sequel nobody asked for. The FDA classified more than 1,500 food recalls in 2025, about four a day, and a large share were Class I, the category reserved for situations where there is a reasonable probability of serious harm or death. A traceability rule meant to speed up outbreak tracing, on the books since 2022, had its compliance date pushed from January 2026 to July 2028, and Congress directed the FDA not to enforce it before then. Self-regulation did not work in 1906, and it is not working now.

The food system is not alone. Boeing certified its own 737 MAX through an FAA delegation process that let the manufacturer’s own employees do most of the safety review. The flight control software that brought down two planes and killed 346 people was never flagged because Boeing did not tell the FAA it was significant enough to look at. The regulator let the regulated decide what the regulator needed to see.

Purdue Pharma sold OxyContin as less addictive than other opioids, and the FDA-approved label gave the claim its cover: a sentence, added at the FDA’s suggestion, saying the drug was “believed to reduce the abuse liability.” The FDA reviewer who led the approval went to work for the company two years later, and in 2007 Purdue pleaded guilty to marketing the drug “with the intent to defraud and mislead.” The structure did not just allow the corruption; it incentivized it.

What it looks like in practice

So what does being a bad capitalist actually look like? It is not complicated. When I buy something, I follow a hierarchy: local mom and pop first, then a local chain, then a remote mom and pop, and a national chain as last resort territory. The point is to keep money circulating in the community as long as possible before it gets sucked up into some shareholder vacuum. I buy from CSA farms, where you pay a farm upfront for a share of the season’s harvest. The farmer gets capital when they need it, and I get better food than what sits on a grocery store shelf for a week, and the money goes to the person working the land, not to a distributor marking it up.

And when I can, I support businesses that have built ethics into their actual legal structure. Benefit corporations are a legal structure, recognized by most states, that requires the company to consider employees, customers, community, and the environment in its decisions, not just shareholders. There is also a certification called Benefit Corporations for Good, based right here in Oregon, that gives small businesses a path to that kind of accountability without the cost and complexity of the national certification process.

The distinction matters. A company can say it cares about its community and still be legally obligated to put shareholders first, while a benefit corporation is legally obligated to consider the community. One is a press release. The other is a contract. The structure has to be part of the DNA, because if it is just a value statement on a breakroom wall, it will be the first thing cut when the numbers get tight.

Service

There is a piece that goes beyond where you spend your money, and that is where you spend your time. “Good” capitalism has broken what it means to be in a society. When everything is optimized for profit, the things that hold a community together, the schools, the safety nets, the shared infrastructure, get treated as costs to cut. Schools in particular are one of the big victims in the pursuit of profit, and the kids who need the most support get the least of it.

People need to lean into service to fill the gaps the system leaves open. I volunteer with Connected Lane County, mentoring young people in technology through their youth programs, and I donate to keep those programs running.

I am not suggesting volunteering fixes the structural problem. It does not. But while the structure is being rebuilt, real kids are falling through real cracks right now, and showing up for them is not optional. I show up with my time and I show up with my checkbook, because the programs do not run on good intentions alone. Deed, not creed.

And I want to be honest about what all of this is. The buying hierarchy, the CSA, the mentoring: this is what being a bad capitalist looks like for somebody with surplus money and surplus time. The person working two jobs to get to Friday is not a worse capitalist than I am for buying whatever is cheapest. The personal version of this only scales to people who can afford it, which is the reason it cannot be the answer. The whole point of a default is that you do not need disposable income to land on the right thing.

Where the instinct comes from

I know where this comes from, or at least I think I do. I went to the Fieldston School in New York, part of the Ethical Culture Society, which was founded in 1878 by Felix Adler. Adler was a professor of political and social ethics who had started the Ethical Culture movement two years earlier, and his motto was “deed, not creed.” He believed that good works, not belief, were the basis of ethical living. The school started as the Workingman’s School, built to give kids who would not otherwise have had access to a quality education with moral development woven through it.

I did not think much about any of this when I was a kid sitting in those classrooms. Fieldston required service work as part of graduation, and it just felt normal because everyone was doing it. I did not realize until this year, watching the Ethical Culture Fieldston School’s Founder’s Day keynote, that I never stopped. The service work continued after I graduated and has been built into my life and career for over 30 years. My distaste for chasing power, my instinct that profit is fuel and not a destination, my reflex to look at a system and ask who it is designed to serve, all of that traces back to an upbringing that treated ethics as something you do, not something you believe. Deed, not creed. Structure, not self-regulation.

A solution

I know that not every business can be a benefit corporation, and not every purchase can be local. The national chain sometimes wins on price, and price matters when money is tight. I am not pretending there is a purity test here, but the direction matters.

So what would actually make it a default? I keep coming back to the big one: a mandatory give-back tied to the community where a business operates. In theory, that is what taxes are supposed to do. But it falls apart in practice, and not by accident. Communities compete for investment, so the moment a big company wants to move in, the community hands it a tax exemption to close the deal. If one town holds the line, the factory goes to the next town over. The exemption is not a bad habit; it is the competition working exactly as designed, and the largest companies end up paying the least.

I do not think a tidy fix is a mystery, though the pieces are not easy to get. Taxes are supposed to be the mandatory give-back; the leak is the exemption. Plug the leak at the state level, where towns cannot grant exemptions to undercut each other, and the race to the bottom stops being winnable. The race does not vanish, it just moves up a level, states playing the same game against states. But the deals are not free, and the state that wins the bidding ends up eating the costs.

The other piece is the corporate form itself. Make the accountable version the standard, the way benefit corporations are now an opt-in, so a company has to justify serving shareholders alone instead of just doing it because nothing says otherwise. That is what the fix looks like: not asking anyone to be better, just removing the doors that let them be worse. The hard part is that the same competition that defeats local fixes fights changing the rules too, which is why it has not happened yet.

The answer is not to hope people do better. The answer is to build it so the right thing happens by default.