What #TEAMTREES Proved About the Free Market

PEOPLE like to give capitalism a lot of hard time. Oh dear, it’s one of the biggest bogeyman to people out there! “Corporations and capitalists are the source of all our woes,” is the rallying cry for millions. Proper, orthodox capitalism - as a result - is not practiced in any country in the World, and every economy is either “mixed” or purely socialist.

Why is this? Well, beyond a general ignorance of economics and capitalist theory, it is usually because of emotional reasons. As I will cover in more detail in a future article, many things nowadays are dealt with through emotional displays and not logical reasoning. Abortion? People cry and stamp their feet over it. Immigration? People cry and stamp their feet over this. There is so much yelling and emotion, no talking.

How does this relate to popular opinion regarding the free market? Well, rather than dealing with the issue logically, people cry and whine over things such as “exploitation”, “greed”, “discrimination”, and other things as issues with capitalism and solely caused with capitalism. Even though we do not live in a capitalist economy any economic issues are blamed on “greedy capitalism”.

As I’ve covered in another article, the climate is one of the focus points of emotional fanaticism nowadays. Oh boy, the turtles! Oh God, the Amazon is gonna disappear! AND IT’S ALL CAPITALISM’S FAULT!

Actually, it isn’t. And this is the point of today’s article. While so much is blamed on capitalism and all things - traditionally - “right-wing”, the truth is these are baseless blames. The very fact we do not have a capitalist economy is enough proof of this.

However, the environment specifically. I do not deny we need to protect the environment, which was not the purpose of my article on climate alarmism. We absolutely need to. I just wholeheartedly reject that a New World Order needs to be ushered in to accomplish ecofriendliness. Indeed, all that is needed is the free market, which is being blamed for climate change to begin with.

The case study I want to work with is #TEAMTREES. #TEAMTREES is the name for a fundraiser that was spearheaded by YouTube superstar MrBeast and Mark Rober. Its goal was to raise money to plant 20,000,000 trees by the end of 2020, and it started on October 25, 2019. It exceeded its goal by December 26, 2020, raising $23,505,473. It involved hundreds of YouTubers, their millions of followers, and a handful of prominent companies, too.

So, what does #TEAMTREES prove? It proves that capitalism/the free market is absolutely capable of and willing to defend the environment. The 23 million trees funded by this fundraiser are expected to cover 81 square miles and remove 116,000 tons of chemical air pollution. And was any of this accomplished by public funding, the EPA, political bickering, or any governmental process?

Nope! It was purely accomplished through the capitalist principles of private property, private enterprise, and private investment. Per the famous capitalist maxim, “People know how to spend their money better than the government."

The private organization responsible for organizing #TEAMTREES, the Arbor Day Foundation, has planted over 300 million trees beyond the #TEAMTREES event. Again, all this through private enterprise. All those trees are enough to remove two million tons of chemical air pollution and cover 1,000+ square miles of land. 

So, all this proves that the free market is more than capable of taking care of Mother Nature.

Indeed, the concept of free market environmentalism has been on the books for decades. It has just been lampooned and ignored by nanny-statists for just as long. Still, time has treated free market environmentalism very well, showing its merits. The premier book on this is the aptly-named Free Market Environmentalism.

So, plain and simply, the machinations of the free market are more than enough to take care of the environment and civilization. Beyond the environment exclusively, private charities like Feeding America have helped use private enterprise to feed countless families, using one dollar to buy one pound of food; in 2020 alone Feeding America donated over two billion pounds of food. It is a well-established fact that government welfare is vastly less efficient in comparison to private charity. Private parks have even shown to be better than public parks (see also)!

In conclusion, what the #TEAMTREES fundraiser proved - despite whatever the political leanings of its sponsors are - is that the free market is vastly more efficient in terms of helping the environment than the government ever could be. The free market simply acts, distributes, and responds faster than the government. Entrepreneurs respond to market forces with far less bureaucratic red tape than politicians do in order to construct a new bathroom in Capitol Hill. Simply, trust the market.


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