he was honest, treated his customers and employees fairly, and built a product of uncompromising quality and ingenuity.

But even more important than than that, he ran a company that built cruising sailboats. He loved boats, building and sailing them, and had devoted his entire life to that end. He was highly educated as a naval architect, spent a long and difficult apprenticeship learning the trade working for other companies, and could physically do every job at his boatyard, from design, to construction, to individual trades like laying fiberglass or routing plumbing and wiring. He eventually started his own firm because he realized that was the only way he could build the boats he felt needed to be built.

And he managed to be successful in the marketplace, too, putting out a quality boat in a field which is fiercely competitive. He was a boat builder, and his company was built around that ancient art and craft. It wasn't just a machine for generating profit, where what was built and how it was built was totally irrelevant to the prime directive of squeezing just one more dollar out of the employee and the customer..

Yes, I have a great deal of respect for that kind of capitalist, not the kind who just sees commerce as a means of producing revenue, and a company as something temporary to be discarded or replaced with some other "enterprise" the moment it
has saturated its market or exhausted its customers or polluted the environment. The yachting industry is filled with people like this, people who love the sea and ships and have devoted their lives to it. I admire them intensely, as I do other businessmen in other fields who are just as devoted to their fields, whether they be publishing, or railroads, or aviation, or digital electronics. But when these men die, or feel the need to retire, if they cannot leave their firms to families with the same devotion, they sell out to holding companies who have no knowledge or affection for books, trains, aircraft or computers. They soon become just machines for making profit, to be squeezed dry until they no longer produce. THAT's the kind of capitalism I despise.

You see Buck, I do not hate capitalism. I recognize that, with all its faults, it is a powerful and dynamic force that has created and molded the modern world. And further, that it offers the common man the opportunity to participate in the economic life of his community (at some level other than wage slave).

What I find disturbing is the way it is dominating our society, its culture and institutions, how it has infiltrated our government and law, and how it has replaced the criterion for all human activity with one simple myopic commandment: excellence and value are determined by only one result: profit.

Maybe I have created filters for myself, but I submit sometimes we have to oversteer a bit in order to get get back on course. My evidence? I've noticed, that when in conversation, public or private, any criticism of the commercial ethos is made, even in connection to some other, marginally related topic, there is immediately someone who feels the need to step forward and stop that line of thought immediately and decisively. To make sure that his vision is the only accepted, and acceptable, narrative, the party line. Its as if any challenge to that desperately embraced religion is threatening, and terrifying to someone who has bet his entire being to it..

In spite of my materialist persuasion, I see myself as a very spiritual person, but I can also recognize superstitious and cultish behavior when I see it.

https://goodoldboat.com/october-2004-island-packet-interview/

This isn't just all wind-and-wave stuff, but a lot of business and marketing savvy as well. I think you would profit by reading the interview.