The barnacles don't care

I am introduced to the term of Trophic Cascades in this lovely video about the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. I am familiar with the concept but not the term.


Click to enlarge.

I wonder if anyone has done any research on this concept in economic systems. I am not finding anything via Google. I cannot help but think of Mancur Olson and his argument in The Rise and Decline of Nations. His argument is that through rent seeking, free-riding, and regulatory capture, over time, complex but stable societies will experience economic stagnation owing to the accretion of groups seeking to leverage the coercive power of the state to foster non-communal interests. Big Labor, Big Business, Big Media, Big Oil, etc. Think of barnacles on a ship.

What all of these Bigs do is constrain choices, reduce freedom of action on the parts of individuals and most fundamentally reduce competition. They use regulations and the tax code and ordinances to reduce the freedom of individuals to benefit the limited interests of the Big advocates. This is on display right now in the City of Los Angeles where, under the guise of Social Justice and purported interest in the welfare of the poor, a mix of advocacy groups, including Big Labor, have just gotten the City Council to pass an ordinance raising the minimum wage to a "living wage" of $15.00 per hour. All sounds quite noble, right?

Ignore the forecast loss of jobs, closure of small businesses, etc. Pull back the curtain and look at the real motives on display. The ordinance is now passed. The first thing Big Labor is doing is to get its members exempted from the new minimum wage. Why on earth you ask? If businesses now face the choice of paying $15 an hour for unorganized labor versus, say, $10 an hour for unionized labor, for the first time, they have an incentive to bring in the unions. Employees in general suffer owing to decreased employment. Union members gain nothing (presuming their current minimum wage is below $15 an hour) and forgo an increase in income, but the Union leadership gains a powerful organizing tool. The Union (and its leadership) is the real winner by gaining more members and their dues. And what happens to the productivity of the economy, the welfare of the unemployed, the choices of consumers, etc.? The barnacles don't care.

So what I am wondering is whether the absence of competition is not analogous to the absence of wolves in an ecosystem.

By introducing freedom, choice and competition into a stagnant system befouled with barnacles and other sclerotic life forms, is that not an economic version of an ecological Trophic Cascade? For example, were the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping essentially a form of Economic Trophic Cascade?