i've always wondered why someone hasn't started a non-profit business to start selling goods and services, in which they should be able to out-compete the for-profit enterprises, since they can sell at cost just to break even, or sell at less of a markup.
you could get one going, then use what would be the "profits" (since you can't keep them) as seed funding a second similar non-profit in a different industry, then a third, by then the 2nd one could seed fund a fourth, and so on and so on until eventually, you would have expanded into every industry. and over time, since you can always out-compete the capitalist, you would have monopolized every industry with non-profit enterprises.
depending on how you structured it, you could stipulate some kind of collective social ownership, or each industry could be run as a non-profit worker cooperative with workplace democracy.
i am sure there are a thousand little reasons why this might fail, but i don't see any big gotcha? it seems like a sound idea. i guess maybe the capitalists would be willing to run at a loss to try and stop you, but that's still a good outcome? maybe try to make it illegal? i am not sure how you could make it illegal to sell good and services at break-even prices. price controls, ok fine, we will just have more money for seed funding.
i guess TLDR the ability to run a not-for-profit business seems like a pretty big weakness for capitalism.
Businesses use their profits to grow. Without profit, your business can't grow unless someone invests money into it, and they have no incentive to do so if they don't make money from the investment.
Plus you can break even on every transaction but lose money overall, if you don't sell every unit you produce.
Well, this really depends on where you put expanding the business on the ledger. If you consider expansion a business expense, then you could still put money to that without having "profit". A non-profit can have earnings, they just can't distribute those earnings to the owners as a "profit". A non-profit can end up with very large surpluses which they can do various things with, including fund other non-profits, or expanding the enterprise.