The Myth of Capitalism

Chapter ThreeWhat Monopolies and King Kong Have in Common

I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.

—Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

In 2007 Rosemary Alvarez, a young woman in Arizona, went to the Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph's Hospital because she had balance problems, difficulty swallowing, blurred vision, and numbness in her left arm.

It was her second visit to the emergency room. Strangely, her earlier tests had come back as normal. Doctors could not explain her symptoms until they saw something deep in her brain. An MRI scan revealed what looked like a brain tumor near her brain stem. Dr. Peter Nakaji, a neurosurgeon, was worried: “Ones like this that are down in the brain stem are hard to pick out, and she was deteriorating rather quickly, so she needed it out.”¹

Alvarez was prepared for surgery, and Dr. Nakaji and his colleagues went into the operating room, expecting to remove a tumor. What they found, however, was bizarre; Alvarez had a worm in her brain.² A worm was an unpleasant finding, but they were relieved it was not a life‐threatening tumor.

Worms have become a lot more common in the United States in recent years. According to Raymond Kuhn, professor of biology and an expert on parasites, “Upwards of 20 percent of neurology offices in California have seen it.”³ However, the pork tapeworm is not new and has afflicted people for thousands of years. The parasite lives in undercooked pork tissue, and ...