By Larry Oscar
It’s been interesting to observe the reaction of some people to government 
failures. What seems so obvious to many seems to totally escaping the thought process of others. “Why is it that government agencies fail while private corporations succeed”, a liberal friend of mine recently asked? Sometimes all you can do to help these poor folks is just smile. The answer lies in the observations of a man by the name of Charles Darwin. Back in 1859 Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species and the rest is history.
Over 99.9 percent of all species that ever lived on this planet have fallen to extinction. We are a product of natural selection and if we fail to adapt to changes in climate and our environment, we will follow the same fate. Darwin’s observation of natural selection is not limited to nature alone. It is the reason that Socialism, Marxism, and big governments fail while Capitalism succeeds.
In order for a society to prosper the society must have a viable economy supported by trade and successful business. That has been true for all great civilizations, past and present. Capitalism supports the process of natural selection in an economy. Whereas, Socialism and Marxism do not. Under Capitalism businesses must adapt to an ever changing market or fail and become extinct. Under Socialism and Marxism the government props up what the government decides businesses should become, regardless of the market conditions. This leads to a costly and prolonged, but inevitable extinction of the business. Why, because the process of natural selection has not been allowed to occur.
The Capitalist free market is the crucible that weeds out the weak. There can be no greater example of Darwin’s natural selection process than the United States Post Office versus the United Parcel Service. If an outside observer were to pick a winner among these two the logical choice would have been the United States Post Office. After all, the Post Office can deliver both first class mail and parcels while UPS can only deliver parcels. And UPS was not allowed to deliver first class mail by law. A government interference in the market. The failure of the Post Office is a glaring example of why government intervention in the free market process will always inevitably end in failure.
Historically the failures of great civilizations can be traced to an ever increasing size of government and the government interference in the free market forces that result in the collapse of trade, business, and ultimately the economy. Capitalism is often described as “brutal” because there will be losers, winners, and failures. May I remind all that capitalism is no different than sports. When you compete in baseball, football, golf, or any other sport it would be ludicrous to compete and not have winners and losers. So why is the competition in a capitalist business environment any different? Do you think the early baseball teams of the early 1900’s would stand a chance against the teams of today? No way. Why? Because sports has evolved. We have much more skilled players and better training and equipment today. We no longer play golf with wooden handle clubs or leather covered golf balls. Our tennis rackets today are lightweight carbon fiber, not wood.
Like sports, market free competition in business is absolutely essential. And it is essential that government keep the interference in the market to an absolute minimum. We have pumped tens of billions of borrowed government money into GM. The GM story has yet to write it’s final chapter. GM has not been “saved” as many are claiming now. GM has only survived until now because of a government handout. GM will be back in trouble within a few years or decades at most when the government handout money is gone and once again they have to stand on their own two feet. The systemic problems at GM are still there, and those problems will bring GM to it’s knees sooner or later. A very good read on this subject is John Stossel’s new book entitled No They Can’t. It cites numerous examples of government failures in the free market place. You can pick it up on Amazon for about $17 at:
http://www.amazon.com/They-Cant-Government-Fails-But-Individuals
And be kind to your emotional friends. After all, they may have an issue! You also may want to read up on that subject as well…My Stroke of Insight by Jill Taylor, Ph.D. It’s a great story of a true scientist and what she discovered about the brains thought processes.