Apex Inc.
It turns out that even God sometimes uses inexact metaphors when trying to make a point. We were talking about things that are wrong with the United States and how they get all intertwined and twisted back on each other.
Some of what’s wrong is that we’ve got people in power who think that everything must be driven by a profit motive, that that’s the only thing that will lead to people doing a good job. God and I freely agreed that central planning only works when the planners are omniscient, but we also recognized that the free market leads to twenty different laundry soaps with little to no difference between them. And thinking that the free market can solve everything leads to absurdities like profit driven medical care.
It was right about then that God came out with his mismatched analogy. He told me that corporations are the apex predators of modern society and that government is supposed to serve as the immune system to protect us from them. But of course I pointed out that immune systems are not what takes down apex predators.
Now that I think about it though, maybe the analogy isn’t so wrong after all. Immune systems are good at taking out things the size of bacteria, not the size of lions and tigers and bears, so maybe that’s why the government has become so poor at reigning in big business. Corporations have been pushed by evolutionary pressure until they’ve grown too big for government to effectively keep them in check. No wonder they want to keep government small.
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