Every beginning textbook on accounting will mention this.
There are many kinds of costs incurred by corporations, but also by partnerships, small businesses, mom & pop stores and individual people. Wages, utilities, equipment, materials, and so on.
One of them is called Social Costs. It's the effect you have on the environment and human society around you.
Historically Corporations have not paid these costs, and fight to avoid them, because to pay them will reduce profit or force them into a loss. Corporations that run at a loss for too long will die (aka bankruptcy).
The result is that the environment and human society pay these costs for the corporation. When humans don't pay them, the environment is degraded, perhaps permanently. Thus we get polluted air and water, slag heaps, clearcut forests, plastic everywhere, bad health care, slave wages, and so on, without end.
Other than their avoidance of paying their Social Costs, I don't really have a major argument with Capitalism and Corporations.
Corporations should be required to pay their social costs and do it without decades of litigation before they cough up. This involves significant restructuring of our legal and capital-raising systems.
But the idea is simple. Don't damage people and the environment, because you will pay for whatever damage you do. You can't just walk off and say "I don't live here, so screw you," which is the equivalent of hiding behind the "corporate veil." If a person behaved this way, we'd diagnose them as sociopathic or psychopathic.
In effect, corporations, as currently operating, have serious personality disorders.
If corporations accept from the start that they need to pay - or avoid creating - their social costs, capitalism can survive. If they don't, they will so destroy the environment and human societies that nothing will survive.
It's the same as telling your kids, "You mess up the living room, you clean it up, and you do it now."
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