Big companies are paperclip maximizers, for money instead of paperclips. It’s strange how many people can see the danger of a hypothetical nonhuman intelligence with a goal of making as many paperclips as possible, but not the danger of actual nonhuman intelligences with the goal of making as much money as possible.
In theory optimizing for money long term should align everyone's interests. The problem is that (for a number of reasons) public executives have far more incentive to be short sighted.
No, it doesn't. You're assuming that markets have a computational efficiency and smoothness that simply isn't there. P != NP.
Markets are a heuristic based around mediating between the interests of different parties precisely because the overall problem is computationally hard. If markets achieved the kind of optimality you're thinking, then top-down central planning would also be workable.
Sure, but the usual counterargument is that the air and water need to be made legible to the market (through private ownership or the correct externality taxes), and then everything will be perfect. While in reality that's demanding a level of computation from markets that they simply do not possess.
