Opportunities for plunder

Civil society is necessary for the accomplishment of any collective task or corporate objective. 

Modern day commercial institutions have erected a variety of devices – laws of contract and methods of management and ways of organizing commercial enterprise and its behavior – all designed to allow people who are not particularly familiar with each other to be able to act as though they were. Competitive market forces are effective only insofar as they induce people to form co-operative enterprises that then can enter the marketplace and behave in mild and gentle sport under a strict set of well-refereed rules of conduct. 

So long as the benefits to co-operation clearly dominate the advantages to plunder, or, put another way, the collective plunder of one domain rewards the collaboration in another domain, we will see relatively benign conduct in the social order. 

Once the opportunities for plunder are exhausted the people will begin to take advantage of each other.