Do you remember when you were young and your parents and teachers taught you the importance of sharing? If you have your own kids now, you are probably teaching them to share as well. Sharing does make you a better person as it helps you to interact with others and develop trust with other people.

All these great aspects of the ‘sharing economy’ should be embraced by everyone.

Finally, all those years practicing to share your toys and stuff with your siblings is paying off! In fact, the sharing economy is actually taking off. The sharing economy, also known as collaborative consumption, is the socioeconomic model in which a pool of individuals all benefit from gaining access to physical assets without actually needing to own the underlying assets, which are often prohibitively expensive. Businesses, programmes and even smartphone applications are allowing people to share goods or services with one another. In some cases there isn’t even a price attached to the service and in other cases the companies only accept donations.

If you have ever used Uber or Lyft instead of a taxi cab then you have participated in the sharing economy. These businesses essentially offer ride sharing programmes that function much like taxi services. These functions have become widely popular as it only takes a smartphone and a loaded app and you can get a ride that in many cases is cheaper and with a better car.

These are just two businesses that one can access on the sharing economy. Locally, Jobber.bm, is another company looking to connect people who have errands with people willing to do them. Need to paint a wall, but don’t have time or the tools? Post the job on Jobber.bm and it will connect you with someone who can do it for you … for a price. Need a job? Post your resume on Watson.bm and do a jobs search for opportunities. Need to sell some used goods? Fire up an advert on eMoo. Simply want to give something away for free? Load up Facebook and try ‘freecycle’. There really is a market for anything.

In fact the sharing economy is part of free markets and this is a wonderful thing. If you listen to some radio talk shows or read some newspaper commentaries, however, you know that they get a bad rap. Many pundits actually believe governments can do a better job and that you can’t trust free markets. They even believe in many instances that a market wouldn’t exist or be viable without government.

But we all know that’s not true and pretty silly. Services like Uber, Lyft, and Jobber.bm already prove it. These companies directly connect customers with workers.

Most importantly, however, is that the government doesn’t need to get involved to make sure everyone behaves. The major factor involved in this is trust.

When you were younger and lent that GI Joe to Tommy to play with for the night you trusted he would bring it back (sometime missing the gun, but hey, that was Tommy).

Tommy also knew that if he lost it or stole it you probably wouldn’t have been so generous and are not likely to ever conduct toy deals with him again.

The Uber driver is trusting you won’t mess up his/her car and you are trusting the driver that he/she will drop you off on Front Street and not Horseshoe Bay. These services are actually making people trust more. This is a great thing.

Unfortunately in many cases, governments throughout the world don’t feel the same way. Pittsburgh’s Public Utility Commission denied Lyft and Uber the right to operate. Virginia has banned them state wide.

The politicians and bureaucrats say they aren’t against sharing, it’s just that they want to ‘make sure’ these companies follow the same regulatory red tape guidelines and pay taxes fees. In other words, if you come up with a different business model and don’t pay the government something for it you can’t operate.

This is like operating organised crime that offers ‘protection for a price’. If you don’t pay you can’t play.

In this case taxi companies are obviously upset. In the UK some 12,000 cab drivers in London went on strike to protest Uber. Unfortunately, it only accelerated the sharing economy — the next week Uber subscriptions soared 850 percent! You can’t regulate away good business. It always finds a way to win. That is the beauty of free market capitalism.

To some cab companies the world is stagnant — devoid of evolution and unchanging. People have been calling cabs for their entire lives — now we have options. These options are creating competition and competition demands better value and service. The internet has also created a client rating system for many products and services where customers can give both numeric and narrative score on various services.

When a seller knows that his customers may post a bad rating if their product or service is not up to par, the incentive is to provide superior products and services in order to generate more business. Imagine if every store clerk knew that their consistent bad attitude would be viewed by thousands of people on the internet.

This is a great replacement for regulation since the court of public opinion determines success or failure.

The ride-sharing phenomena and online marketplaces are just the beginning. When people start sharing and trusting each other incredible new paradigms and businesses open up. Market-driven competition intensifies and consumers all benefit as companies large and small battle to provide the highest quality goods and services, with the greatest speed and at the lowest cost.

It’s a perfect example of how the world can evolve for the better when we all demand value and the government gets out of the way. This is really why free markets work best. The fact is every transaction in a capitalist system is a voluntary one.

Capitalism promises you can have anything you want as long as you provide enough people with what they want. It is NOT a zero-sum game where one side wins at the expense of another.

Unlike government mandates, the sharing economy is all about individual choice and trust.

Your teachers and parents were right — sharing makes economic sense.