Moisés

“Ironically, it is often the most tough-minded, no-nonsense right-wingers who go all soft when it comes to economic competition. People who would never be so naïve as to suggest that athletes might “voluntarily” refrain from taking steroids will turn around and push for “industry self-regulation” over government intervention, as if corporations might just choose to stop polluting or refrain from producing false advertising. It’s difficult to imagine a more total misunderstanding of the underlying dynamic of capitalism. Part of the problem involves the familiar failure to distinguish between the virtues of the market and the virtues of particular firms in the market. When the competition is staged just right, corporations will deliver unparalleled levels of efficiency. But it is almost never in a particular firm’s interest to produce at a level that will generate efficient outcomes for society as a whole. Companies are forced to operate efficiently by the rules of the competition. If they can find any way around these rules, they will naturally go for it.”
― Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets

“No discussion of this pattern would be complete without mentioning one fateful little tweak we have introduced into the set of rules that governs these types of organizations. This tweak is what makes the difference between a simple hierarchy and a bureaucracy. Whereas a traditional hierarchy appoints individuals from outside the organization to the various leadership roles, a classic bureaucracy relies upon internal promotion. It allows its members to move up through the ranks as a reward for successful completion of their assigned duties within the organization. This small innovation, which is generally credited to the Chinese, can generate significant improvements in organizational efficiency. A traditional hierarchy relies quite heavily upon negative sanctions in order to keep members “in line” at every tier. These sanctions tend to accumulate in force as one moves downward through the hierarchy, so that those at the very bottom often get “dumped on.” As a result, the overall quality of life of subordinates generally deteriorates as one moves down the organizational hierarchy. As they say in the corporate world, “Shit rolls downhill.” Bureaucratic forms of organization, however, turn this into a virtue. The prospect of moving up is used as an incentive to improve performance at every level. There is something vaguely diabolical about the incentive structure that is offered to subordinates, of course, because it organizes things in such a way that the only chance to reduce the amount that you get “dumped on” in the long term is to let people dump on you for now. But there can be no doubt that this incentive structure works.”
― Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets

“Morality, in this view, is a kind of internal control system that helps us avoid prisoner’s dilemmas. Kant’s supreme principle of morality— “Don’t make an exception of yourself”—amounts to a moral prohibition against free-riding. If you can improve your own situation only by making others worse off, then this is not something that you could will to be a “universal law.” You are clearly hoping to make an exception of yourself. And so morality prohibits that course of action.”
― Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets

“The so-called “Goulash capitalism” episode in Hungary clearly illustrated the problem. In 1994, shortly after the privatization of agriculture and food production, the country was swept by an epidemic of lead poisoning. After searching far and wide for the cause, doctors and scientists finally tracked down the source of the problem. Manufacturers of paprika—a staple of Hungarian cuisine—had been grinding up old paint, much of it lead-based, and adding it to the spice in order to improve its colour. The practice was so widespread that Hungarian officials were forced to order all the paprika in the country removed from store shelves and destroyed. At the time, no laws were in place to prevent such a catastrophe, simply because it had not occurred to anyone that this kind of thing would happen. Under communism, in which firms had no competition, no one had any incentive to poison their customers, and so consumer protection laws were unnecessary. In making the transition to the market, policy-makers assumed that producers would compete with one another to produce the best-quality paprika. They didn’t realize that producers would compete only to produce the best-looking paprika.”
― Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets