Tell it to the people who died from this latest salmonella outbreak: (HT TPM)

The company e-mails obtained by the House panel showed that Peanut Corp. of America owner Stewart Parnell ordered the shipments tainted with the bacteria because he was worried about lost sales.At one point, Parnell said his workers "desperately at least need to turn the raw peanuts on our floor into money" and at another point told his plant manager to "turn them loose" after learning some peanuts were contaminated with salmonella.

UPDATE: This is a post in need of clarification. I understand that self-interest, properly understood, would lead a business owner (probably, if the numbers are right, and depending on the likely consequences) to refuse to ship the tainted food. My point in posting the story was to give an illustration of how the unregulated market achieves efficiency over the long run, and the human costs that entails. The free-market working depends on being willing to let people get it wrong and be punished. Over the long run, the argument goes, we'll all be better off. But this is scant comfort to those who are killed in the process. The problem with the utilitarian moral calculus that lies behind much free-market fundamentalism is that it trades on the well-being of individuals in ways that often cannot be compensated after that fact, as in this case. Hence the importance of (1) moral education that leads people (like the owner in this case) to recognize reasons other than dollars and cents, and (2) sensible, ex ante regulation and regulatory enforcement, to try to prevent these things from happening in the first place.