Milo

   One of the most controversial characters in Catch-22 the cook for the squad, Milo Minderbinder. He is a sweet but intelligent man who stands for many ideals, and his acts represent a juxtaposition between capitalism and communism or socialism. 

   Milo starts off as only being a good cook and a successful businessman, but this judgement quickly spins when the reader learns more and more about him. Claiming "everyone has a share", he explains his business process as a cycle and never-ending switching of hands of his products, at the point where it seems logical and tangible that he can buy eggs at seven cents-a-piece in Malta and make a profit by selling them at five cents-a-piece in Bologna. This system includes a very complicated process of buying and selling, trading and creating goods. 

   Just when the reader thinks that Milo's system is very efficient and a part of the perfect mix of socialism with capitalism and that Heller is a perfect candidate to a Nobel prize in Economics, the book transcends to the dark and gloomy part of Milo's economic system. It comes to the extreme where his own planes and bombs attack their own squadron, killing and injuring many of the group, just because Milo made a lucrative deal with the Germans. This shows the cruelty of the economic system, where men will do literally anything in order to make a profit. 

   Milo Minderbinder is the perfect example of the cruel capitalist system, where people make business with friend or foe depending on which is the most profitable. The juxtaposition between the two most recent economic systems just helps in the analogy of the current one, where morals and values are less and less taken into account.