My wonderful friend Hans regularly suggests ideas for blogs. All my readers are encouraged to send me suggestions for my blogs.
I don't promise to use the material suggested, except as one step on the ladder that I might use for climbing somewhere else. Hans was meditating on the relationship between cooperation and commerce. He meant cooperation as used in the meaning one finds in tribal environments.
Tribal cooperation is a tightly knit social intercourse, commercial cooperation is a loose coupling. Explained here.
Cooperation that is the byproduct of commerce is a different word. We cooperate to make businesses work, we cooperate in the marketplace to buy and sell. But that is not the same as a cooperation that occurs in a tribe, family, social environment, social organization like the PTA or a co-op owned by the members or the workers.
Cooperation in the commercial world can be impersonal, and is most of the time.
My perspective on this is a little bit new. It brings up the issue of socialism.
Socialism is pure, unadulterated envy. It consists of two categories of envy. The first is envy of people who are more successful, wealthier, more prosperous or superior in any other way. Socialism promises to equalize the social hierarchy by leveling the economic hierarchy. That is pure envy.
The secondary envy of socialism is envy of the success of industrial commerce. Socialism has no inherent positive functions. It cannot produce wealth, health or well-being in any form. ( Think USSR, China, Cuba etc.) It is pure envy of the industrial commercial world.
Socialism handles the envy by confiscating the tools of production. It gives the tools of production to the government to operate. It makes sure there will always be non-meritocratic bureaucracies in business and that there will be no creative output.
Socialism is pure human envy in the form of an ideology.