it's old hat to point out the prisoner's dilemma of capitalism: that cooperation yields much better outcomes for everyone than a hobbesian war of pure self interest, "all against all".
i've been thinking recently, though, about another paradox that dogmatic capitalists do not address: namely, that the only way to maintain a "pure" capitalist society is for the majority of people to deny their self-interest.
in theory this paradox should never take place; econ 101 says that everyone, maximizing his or her rational self-interest, will lead to the best possible economic outcome for the whole. in practice, lenin and marx were correct in their assumption that unfettered capitalism leads to monopoly and imperialism; i.e., concentration of wealth and power in the hands of just a few actors. (and i suppose this is where i'm obligated to say that they weren't correct about everything, so consider this my offical disclaimer of marxism-leninism.)
in other words, history makes it quite clear that without a strong regulatory regime, powerful entities will dominate the marketplace and squeeze out competitors through means legal and extra-legal.
however, in order to maintain this "pure" capitalist state, free of regulation, everyone else in the marketplace ("the 99%", if you will) must be persuaded not to join together to form labor unions or political parties (or wage full-scale revolutions) to redistribute wealth or enforce regulations on the 1%, even if they'd be much better off doing so.
and here we have the paradox: the 1% justify their obscene wealth and power with a philosophy of self-interest, but ask the 99% to deny their self-interest out of fealty to the Great God Capitalism.
you don't need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows, and you don't need a mathemetician to tell you that this equation is unsustainable.
it seems, though, that in the philosophy of free-market capitalism, some kinds of self-interest are acceptable and some are not. the self-interest of the Koch Brothers is capitalism, but the self-interest of the janitor who votes for a higher minimum wage is socialism.
this applies to groups also, it seems; a coalition of businesses like the Chamber of Commerce promotes capitalism, but a coalition of garbage collectors promotes socialism.
i wonder what the distinction could be.
