Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site utcsri.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcsri!clarke From: clarke@utcsri.UUCP (Jim Clarke) Newsgroups: can.politics Subject: Re: Nationalization/Crown Corps. Message-ID: <1229@utcsri.UUCP> Date: Fri, 5-Jul-85 10:08:53 EDT Article-I.D.: utcsri.1229 Posted: Fri Jul 5 10:08:53 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 5-Jul-85 12:43:07 EDT References: <1121@ubc-cs.UUCP> <1110@mnetor.UUCP> Reply-To: clarke@utcsri.UUCP (Jim Clarke) Distribution: can Organization: CSRI, University of Toronto Lines: 44 Summary: In article <1135@ubc-cs.UUCP> robinson@ubc-cs.UUCP (Jim Robinson) writes: >>This outlook is was seen as simplistic in the nineteenth century. "Survival >>of the fittest" is a phrase Darwin and his pals considered muddle-headed >>when applied to biology. Apply it to society and economics and you get >>"social darwinism" (poor Darwin), one of the underpinnings of our recent >>history of racism and fascism. > >I don't see any problems in applying "survival of the fittest" to >corporations. The problem is that "survival of the fittest" doesn't mean anything, as Bishop Wilberforce pointed out some time ago. > As for linking racism and >fascism to free enterprise - give me a break. I didn't. I linked them to the hoary old "survival of the fittest" catch phrase. > >>Surely you don't believe that supply and demand is going to take care of >>your aged mother, or keep the rivers and the air clean -- unless there's >>some nasty socialist interference? > >No I don't.... > ... there is nothing that you can achieve by government >ownership that you can't achieve otherwise with the right combination >of carrots and sticks. What you said (paraphrased) was that free enterprise handled all considerations naturally, and I took that to mean that no interference was necessary. You now advocate interference of one sort -- carrots and sticks -- as against another -- crown corporations. I expect you could get a pretty heated argument about that even in a business school. Here, at least you should not sound as if crown corporations only are an invention of the devil. (Now we know what colour the devil is: pink like me.) > Since private companies are generally >more efficient than Crown corporations, does it not make more sense to >do it this way? > This follows as a logical conclusion only if efficiency is the overriding consideration. In setting up crown corporations, obviously it is only one among many considerations.