Dear Friends,
It seems to me that the ultimate example of capitalism is nature. Does the flower address the bee’s charity? No… the flower addresses the bee’s self interest. In that way the bee gets a need met and the flower gets a need met. A basic capitalist exchange.
Nature is filled with other examples of capitalist exchanges throughout. From ants protecting a fig tree to people planting cucumbers that is the way the ecosystem has grown. One species of fauna eating a species of flora and thus spreads the seeds of it’s preferred food. Small Wins adding up to a great win for the ecosystem.
There are examples of fraud in the natural world, (corpse flowers and pitcher plants are a few) as there are examples of monopoly (miles of forest… all one aspen tree, duplicated over and over, monopolizing the habitat). The environment around us is rife with examples of the market economy complete with division of labor. (Our little self interested bee handle’s the pollinating segment of the tomato production process).
On a meta scale plants produce sugars and oxygen, and animals use those sugars and oxygen to produce locomotion to move plant‘s seeds and pollen. On a personal scale soy produces oil, sheep-wool, dogs-protection, apple trees-apples… the list is endless. The division of labor in nature is there for anyone to see… if they only open their eyes and look. Marx pointed out that capitalism (the market system) is dynamic. As is nature.
The term capitalist and markets are human words created to explain a phenomenon. There is nothing unnatural at all about exchanging one thing for another or specializing in a job. That is what separated cats from dogs millions of years ago. There is something unnatural about demanding charity from individuals in the form of slavery to government. Benign or otherwise.
I have never heard a complaint about how the flower exploit’s the bee‘s labor. In fact if someone did complain that the flowers were exploiting the bee’s labor and getting rich doing it I suspect people would give the argument the weight it deserves…. None. When we look at a phenomenon from a distance we have perspective. We can see the big picture. But an attribute of perspective is that the closer we get to something the less of it we can see. Like the story of the three blind men describing an elephant.
I can imagine a bee flying into a hive. Tired and frazzled. Birds tried to eat her all day. The flowers were picked over. Her wings are tired and her stinger is sore. She lands with a paltry amount of pollen and nectar for the receivers. They complain she must be slacking off to have so little nectar… It would be easy to convince her that the flowers were exploiting her labor. Then further to convince her the flowers need to be controlled and many would have to be killed in the revolution. In the long term… Would it be in the bee’s best interest to follow, and kill many of the flowers? Does it make a diffrence if the flowers trying to convince the worker bee that other flowers care nothing and do nothing to help the bee cope with, Verona mite, tracheal mite or even the dreaded colony collapse disease?
Today most people know what would happen if we allowed an open river of effluent to run down our streets. We also know what would happen if vermin lived too close to us… Black Plague. Or some other deadly disease. By not taking care to have a full waste cycle we open opportunities for the smallest players in the ecological market to exploit the niche. They will step in and use the nutrients available to them with devastating results for other larger players in the ecological market.
Government policies that restrict supply or demand for a service or thing forces inefficiency into the system. This drives capital into the streets so to speak. This inefficiency is like effluent running down the streets. The wasted capital (effluent) becomes a source of funding (nutrients) for the underground economy. Government policies directly incentivize the underground economy. With the negative externalities that all underground economies have.
Ironically in some countries people are more virtuous to each other in underground economies than they are in the open markets. Because in the underground economies participants are held to their actions. If someone lies or cheats, if they are not executed, they will be ostracized. In the open market they are protected by government policies. Unenlightened policies that are tantamount to flushing effluent into the open streets.
But as with Tracheal mites, it is better to keep the hive free, than to use menthol to control them.