Interesting piece, but Mayer is being disingenuous at best.
"Loss leaders" are part of profit-generating entities and always have been. With a few exceptions, hospitals have always been run in an attempt to turn a profit (that's how you generate cash to re-invest in better gear, for example).
He makes some excellent points (war profiteering, for example), but he has an axe to grind with profit (though I don't know why, since he personally generates plenty of profit) and with capitalism, ignoring the fact that MOST of the ills blamed on capitalism and the "unfettered free market" have far less to do with markets being free and biz trying to turn a profit, and much more to do with government intervention, government boondoggles, and biz turning to gov for protectionism.
Severe the ties between biz & gov and the vast majority of those problems go away.
