The social cost of fiscal profit

"In 1720, the Grande-Saint-Antoine, a merchant ship, was placed under quarantine by officials in the French city of Marseilles. Several crew members had become sick and died from the plague. But this effort to stop the spread of the plague from the ship to city was soon ended by the city's merchants, who pushed for the authorities to release the ship from quarantine so they could bring its valuable cargo to market.

Uncontained, the disease proceeded to kill fifty thousand people in the city, about half its population, and an additional fifty thousand in the surrounding area. These one hundred thousand needless deaths ensued from [the mercantile pursuit of profit and the belief that the market is god]."

From Rediscovering Values, by Jim Wallis, 2010 (hardcover, p71)