General Electric has just announced that it will reduce its quarterly dividend to just one penny per share. This helps show what our mix of capitalism and the free market is truly good at. No, it’s not that we all get to be free, although that’s an obvious benefit, nor is it that we get to experiment and thus find those things that work, making us richer. The real value in the system is the way that it stops us from doing things that don’t work, thereby making us richer.
Sure, it’s a bit premature to insist that GE doesn’t work at all — it’s still in business, after all. We’ve not reached that brutal end stage of the game where an organization succumbs to bankruptcy, the fate of things that truly don’t work. But we’re quite obviously seeing that things don’t work there like they used to, some of the edge has gone.
