Cooperation VS Capitalism

Finding the right balance between cooperation and competition has been the goal and bane of Western politics for centuries. Adam Smith recognized that the economic needs of the individual are better met by unleashing the ambitions of all individuals than by planning to meet those needs in advance. But even Adam Smith could not claim that free markets produce Utopia. Even the most libertarian politician today believes in the need to regulate, oversee, and tax the efforts of ambitious individuals so as to ensure that they do not satisfy their ambitions entirely at the expense of others. In the words of Egbert Leigh, a biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, "Human intelligence has yet to design a society where free competition among the members works for the good of the whole." The society of genes faces exactly the same problem. Each gene is descended from a gene that unwittingly jostled to get into the next generation by whatever means was in its power. Cooperation between them is marked, but so is competition. And it is that competition that led to the invention of gender.

Human intelligence has yet to design a society where free competition among the members works for the good of the whole.