It makes perfect sense that competition, one of the cornerstones of American economics, is hailed as a positive trait...in America anyway. Capitalism operates by pitting businesses against each other, forcing them to engage in a kind of Darwinian dystopian brawl to the death where one business is constantly trying to figure out how best to scam the other out of valuable resources and customers. This has led many to opine that our system is somehow broken; I would argue that the system is working just fine. Capitalism is designed to make a few people very rich, very quickly. It serves no other purpose than that. The only period where capitalism did not do this was after WWII (a luxury reserved mostly for white male veterans of WWII by the way; black people, women and others never benefited from this brief period of compromise between monopolies and the working class), but all the labor movements during that period have long since died out. Sure, you still have labor unions, but their power has been so weakened by the system, that they are hardly taken seriously by political leaders any longer. There were also strong movements to nationalize at least a portion of the economy during these times; France and many other nations attempted to nationalize about a quarter of their economic systems in order to get people out of poverty. However, this attempt at fairness was eventually rejected by the monopolies and corporate owners of the time and have once again been smacked down by democrats and republicans of this era. We are now operating in what is known as "the free market", but it is really nothing more than corporate welfare. The wealthy refuse to pay taxes and seek out ways of avoiding paying them at all cost, while at the same time paying out comically low wages as landlords starve us all to death with equally laughably high rent and utility costs. There will be no savings or property gain from this idiotic system of competition and the prize waiting for us all at the end of the contest is most likely a trip to a subpar nursing home with drastically reduced social security payments and likely no retirement to speak of. The heartlessness in such a system should be more than apparent, but, instead people like to make excuses for this callous behavior, arguing that it is good for people to suffer unnecessarily because that increases competition. Well, they are right that it increases competition, but they are wrong that competition somehow produces better character or stronger work ethic. It produces neither. When we compete against each other, we are trying to win at all costs. That means breaking the rules, fudging the facts and even sabotaging others who may be more talented or likeable than we are. In fact, studies have shown that people who display good, pro social behavior during competitions are rewarded for their efforts with bad, anti-social punishments from others in the same group. In fact, the study showed that people were five times more likely to punish people for good behavior during a competition than they were when there was no competition going on at all. I don't care what your politics are; if you are punishing people for being good, then it should come as no surprise to you that things like crime and the hatred of social institutions are on the rise. The irony of competition is that it encourages anti-social behavior. It makes you money, if you are ruthless enough that is, but it certainly does not make you any friends.