How Capitalism Will Save Us Read Online Free

simply taking too much of something. Texas mom Catherine “K.K.” Patton was motivated by anything but greed when she set out to find a way to minimize the unpleasantness of daily insulin injections for diabetes patients. She perceived a need and a potential market. Patton was mobilized by more than the prospect of financial gain: she herself was a diabetes patient who hated the sticks and bruising of daily needles. Her “self-interest”—both financial and personal—propelled her to invent the i-port injection port, a device worn by patients that reduces the pain of injections. Users inject insulin into a little disk implanted in their skin that delivers medication into their bodies. Recently approved by the FDA, the invention is beginning to catch on with a growing number of diabetes patients.
    Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three young employees of PayPal, were also motivated to fill a need based on self-interest. They wanted to share their home videos over the Internet. In 2005 the three founded YouTube, which virtually overnight became one of the Internet’s biggest success stories, sold to Google after only one year for $1.65 billion. YouTube, of course, has gone far beyond meeting the simple need for which it was invented. It took the Internet revolution one step further, bringing the Web closer to television in its ability to deliver video content. Countless Web sites, including those of major news organizations, now use YouTube to deliver not only taped but live webcasts.
    That’s how growth occurs in a free-market economy. No one “orders” it to take place. It happens spontaneously, almost by accident. But it always happens. That’s what people who buy into capitalism’s bad rap don’t get. When there is a need, entrepreneurs will step in to fill it, appearing seemingly out of nowhere.
    Take, for example, what happened in the mid-1980s, after budget cuts forced the U.S. Coast Guard to scale back some services. The guard could no longer provide nonemergency marine assistance to recreational boaters.Almost immediately, small entrepreneurs took up the slack. In Southold, New York, Joseph J. Frohnhoefer founded Sea Tow, an AAA for boats. His small business grew from a single vessel into a thriving franchise network with 121 locations in the United States, Asia, Europe, the Bahamas, and Puerto Rico.
    Before Frohnhoefer and other entrepreneurs appeared, government was thought to be “needed” to assure nonemergency boater safety. But Frohnhoefer’s private-sector business filled the need for this service as well as, if not better than, government. Frohnhoefer is called on by the Coast Guard to assist in finding lost boaters and major emergencies; his operation aided in the recovery of victims of the crash of TWA Flight 800. But his business is more than a private version of the Coast Guard. It offers a variety of other services such as boat financing and insurance.
    Of course, there will be criminals and greedy individuals in a freemarket economy. That is where government is critical to a free market—to enforce contracts, protect property rights, and maintain order, as it does in the rest of society.
    However, most of the time, democratic capitalism’s self-interest compels people to act responsibly and predictably, to work together in networks of cooperation based on trust. After all, it is in people’s self-interest to act reliably if they want to succeed in the marketplace.
    These roots in a voluntary, open market are what make democratic capitalism more moral than a state-dominated economy—even if the state-run economy is a democracy. Why? Because state-imposed economic solutions reflect the interests of a group of bureaucrats or politicians who are currently in power.
    You may happen to agree with those government solutions. And the designers of those solutions may have good intentions. But when you get down to it, their ideas reflect the wishes and interests of a relative few more