Capitalists can't even get caviar production right

The February 2000 issue of Time-Warner corporation's Life Magazine 
had an excellent article about caviar fishing in the Caspian Sea. 
The 300-million-year-old sturgeon fish is bordering on extinction 
thanks to unbridled capitalism.

"Stalin had caviar black marketeers executed. Today poachers have 
the guns."(p. 30)

Caviar costs over $1000 a pound. Now with five countries' poachers 
at it, the fish stock is depleting and the fish farms are 
abandoned.

The story with endangered species is the same as the story for 
trade in narcotics, weapons and pornography in a profit-driven 
society. Scientifically it works best to let the sturgeon fish 
reach 300 pounds and thereby lay some eggs before catching them. 
Under Stalin, the Soviet economy used such science in its economic 
planning. The humyn focus on planned production to serve humyn 
ends also benefited the sturgeon species relative to the fate it 
faces today.

The economic libertarian theorists of capitalism would say the 
problem is that property is not respected enough in the Caspian 
sea. They would ignore the relative success under Stalin and say 
that capitalism can work there.

Yet there is nothing about selling licenses that can stop fishers 
from overfishing. Only state power in the short run or a 
cooperative economy in the long-run can stop that. As long as 
there are short-run profits to be made, anti-social poaching will 
occur.

The bourgeois theorists might also say that licenses are not good 
enough and the oceans should be sold to the highest bidder just 
like the air. Yet this will not work either as the environment is 
simply not divisible that way. There is no way to buy air or water 
in such a way that one persyn's pollution on his or her "property" 
does not affect another. Capitalism is thus demonstrably 
impractical, an impediment to scientific innovation in production, 
scientific planning and environmental protection.

When people are starving, shooting poachers who interfere with 
maximal production of food is an example of dictatorship of the 
proletariat. One persyn's anti-scientific greed should not 
interfere with the rights of others to eat. In a society with 
planned production, people found with large sums of money from 
black market activities would be caught and punished much more 
easily than under capitalism where profiteering is legal and hard 
to distinguish from black markets.

--MC5