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.
Comments
Post a Comment