capitalism is bad mmkay

I know that there is something that I just don’t understand about the situation, but when I heard the followup to the U.S. beef industry’s woes on NPR yesterday, I experienced the same reaction when I heard the story the first time: huh? Apparently, a small meat-packer in Kansas has gone to the trouble of making it possible to test every cow for mad cow’s disease, as the Japanese now require. The rest of the beef industry turns around and says, “No way!”. You see, this much testing is bad for the industry, because, well, because the rest of the industry would have to actually…compete. At least for re-entry into the Japanese market. Since when did capitalism become such a bad thing for the beef industry? I had the same reaction when I noticed that there was an article describing how Craigslist “costs” newspapers $50 to $65 million a year. OMG! Competition! Horrible! To be fair, that actually isn’t precisely the tone of the article (more of an announcement for a $250 report, really), but this sort of thinking does pervade certain industries.