One of my favorite pastimes is “puttering” in our yard on weekends, working in the garden and doing a bit of landscaping, when needed. With so much of my time and work spent indoors in front of a computer, it’s nice to retreat outside once in awhile to venture into the outdoors and experience nature directly. And venture I did, just a couple of days ago.

I enjoy getting out into the fresh air and sunshine, tending to the various shrubs and flowers throughout our yard, and getting “up close and personal” to … spiders? Yes, spiders. And, boy, do we have some “big” garden spiders here in the Southeast U.S., including the beautiful yet startling black-and-yellow argiope (argiope aurantia). See some “startling” pictures and read about this species at this University of Michigan Museum of Zoology Animal Diversity Web page.

After working in the yard for about two hours, cleaning up the “cuttings” and gathering the garden tools to put back into the shed, I was approaching the side of our house where the garage door is, when “something” caught the corner of my eye, right above a bush, to which I turned and looked and gasped “Yikes!”

After I composed myself, I took a closer look, fascinated by such a large spider. I have seen the black-and-yellow argiope before, as they are fairly common here. But this particular one webbing “her” way between the bush and our garage wall was quite the sight. I say “her” because only the female of this spider species can get so large and so colorful, while the male is only one-third or so as big. She was just sitting there on her web, rocking in the breeze, spread out from leg tip to leg tip to at least three inches! Though they can bite if provoked, the bite is not harmful to most humans. Argiopes tend to mind their own business, and are not interested in the indoors. Which is just fine by us.

I immediately went to retrieve my wife from her own weekend activities, to witness this awesome sight, and also to let her know how close to the garage door the spider was. I didn’t think my wife would have appreciated being surprised by “Ms.” Argiope when opening the garage door.

Once seeing this beautiful specimen, my wife wanted to photograph “Ms.” Argipoe. So we got our Kodak digital camera and clicked away. I suggested to my wife that we should name our neighborly spider. We thought about it, and decided to call her Miss Scarlett, after another famous southern bell. Miss Scarlett just sat there on her web, completely undisturbed by our constant back-and-forth movements taking pictures. Actually, I think Miss Scarlett enjoyed the attention, though she wouldn’t let on about it. You know how these southern bells are.

Now, you are probably wondering why I call Miss Scarlett our Free-Market Spider. Well, after all the pictures were taken, and I finished cleaning up the yard and putting the tools away, I sat for a spell and thought about what had just transpired.

Here I was, enjoying some of my earned leisure time in the freest country in the world, using these marvelous modern gardening tools to care for our plants and landscape, including using a two-wheeled wheel barrel made of a man-made reinforced plastic material that is almost indestructible -– all made possible by the wonderful, competitive, division-of-labor, wealth-producing, capitalist “free-market” system (redundancy never hurts) -- all the while caring for various plants and flowers to beautify and add color to our yard, mowing the lawn with a wonderful Craftsman mulching lawn mower, all occurring around the very nice home we own, built on a wonderful piece of property we also own, when there “she” was, Miss Scarlett, the big garden spider. She was just sitting there, taking it all in -- and taking full advantage of, I might add, a nice, sunny spot, built and provided for by human beings –- by man, the thinking, conceptual animal.

I pondered how wonderful existence, capitalism, the division of labor, individual freedom, private property, and wealth production are. My dream world…

Then reality hit, and I couldn’t help think just how much unnecessary interference, regulation, mandating, taxation, and control there is by our “statist-socialist-communist-environmentalist” oriented dingbat, lunatic political leaders and government officials -- coming at us from every level of government, local-state-federal -- over our freedoms, rights, property rights, income, wealth, finances, including all commerce and business. From a personal point, I can only image how much more could be possible, and how much more I could achieve, if I were able to retain more disposable income and wealth to save and spend, even possibly establishing more personal time to spend with my work or pastimes.

Gee, if I could actually keep more of my earned income and wealth from being taxed to death, and have more of my personal time back instead of using it to earn money to pay taxes, what could I possibly spend more disposable income, wealth, and time on? Oh, I don’t know, how about:

- saving more money for my future security, benefiting a bank or investment company, or

- contribute more money to our favorite private charities, benefiting their activities,

- buying a bigger house and yard with more plants and flowers, benefiting the seller,

- paying someone to help care for my larger yard, benefiting a landscape company, while

- using the time I save from yard work reading and writing, adding to my knowledge, and

- buying more books to read, benefiting the book stores, writers, and authors, or

- paying someone else to mow my lawn, benefiting a lawn-maintenance company, while

- using the time I save from mowing my lawn playing my piano more, and

- paying for professional piano lessons, benefiting the piano teacher, or

- buying more meals out, benefiting the area restaurants and cafes, or

- buying a bread machine to make my own bread, benefiting the bread machine manufacturer, or

- buying better garden tools, benefiting the hardware store, garden shop, and tool manufacturer, or

- maybe build another “man-made” sunny spot providing a home for another garden spider, and

- spending more time with my wife, which would make her very happy.