Cleaned by Capitalism, Polluted by Communism
In a market-based economy, keeping clean is cheap and easy, as the “Cleaned by Capitalism” examples on Cafe Hayek clearly illustrate. It’s only under market-repressing communism that “keeping clean is expensive and complicated.”
By Mark J. Perry at Carpe Diem
Don Boudreaux at the Cafe Hayek blog regularly features posts titled “Cleaned by Capitalism,” here’s a recent example:
“Modern, innovative, industrial competitive capitalism makes available to almost every denizen of the early 21st-century capitalist world a host of inexpensive and effective machines and substances to protect ourselves from what would otherwise be the daily, up-close-and-personal pollution of bacteria from rotting food particles. We have dinnerware – plates, drinking glasses, bowls, pots, pans, and utensils – made of ceramics, plastics, and metals that resist absorbing foods and that can be vigorously washed, daily. We wash these items using inexpensive detergents, hot potable water, and dish cloths and sponges (that more and more are disposable – thus making the cloths and sponges that we use cleaner than otherwise).
“A teenager writes — with his index finger — the words “Wash me” in the dust on the window of the bus. A mother asks her son what the school bathroom is like and he confirms that “it stinks so much you can’t go in there.” A dentist eats a french fry in front of her patient and with unwashed hands proceeds to extract a tooth. A passerby lets his pizza — just out of the oven — drip cheese over the sidewalk, where it accumulates in a pool of fat. A waitress cleans the tables at Coppelia Ice Cream with a smelly rag, and puts out glasses sticky with successive layers of badly scrubbed milk. A spellbound tourist drinks a mojito in which several ice cubes made from tap water are floating. A sewer overflows a few yards from the kitchen of a recreation center for kids and teens. A cockroach quickly darts along the clinic wall while the doctor listens to a patient’s chest.
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