Capitalist Pig Flu – Benes

New Scientist has a piece on re-assessing economics after the crash.
I’ve a half-baked idea here, that is, one the one hand, obvious, but I haven’t seen spelled out anywhere: that free-markets are prone to viruses.

Clearly some memes propagate despite the fact that they aren’t true: astrology; homeopathy etc., the memetic equivalent of viruses.
Much of free-market ideology is based upon application of darwinian ideas to economics.
Therefore, even if free-markets do evolve naturally under natural selection, not all market forces will be benign, there could be the free-market money equivalent of viruses. I’ll call these ‘benes’ (as in bean counter, slang for accountant).
These benes could be merely be specific memes to do with money – such as a speculative or panic rumor, or indirectly such as businesses based on memes e.g. horoscopes. But they could equally be financial instruments, business practices or business environments themselves that are attractive and therefore become widely used, but are damaging to the free market that creates them. (An example of the latter might be lobbying, where businesses such as Verisign, for example, protect a monopoly over .com domain names more effectively by seducing legislators than being competitive.) These are somewhat different from memes since they become much more like organisms, with a life of their own. In some cases, like the SWIFT transaction system or retail bank buildings, they arguably have a phenotype.
The idea that capitalism is prone to periodic viral infection through benes, seems like an obvious thing to investigate. It also creates a middle road between the doomsayers that claim that macro economics is dead and the libertarians who say that it would have been OK to let everything fail. The message: ‘Capitalism works overall, but be careful’. Just how careful, might be something that could be ascertained scientifically.