This idea lies at the heart of libertarian and conservative thinking. The argument says that human beings excel when they are competing with one another for dominance. The free market is the best economic system in the world, we're told, because private enterprises compete with one another for market share.
This is the thinking behind the movement to privatize government services. In fact, it's the very same thinking which led the conservative American Enterprise Institute to design the set of policies the world now knows as "Obamacare."
It's also wrong. We saw that in the ignominious failure of libertarian Eddie Lambert, the Sears CEO who drove his company into the ground with the misguided notion that internal competition among his company's departments would cause each of them to function more efficiently. That proved to be an enormously frustrating experience for customers, and ignominious failure for the corporation as a whole.
These ideas, along with a number of other misguided notions, have caused Sears stock to lose more than half its value. (Lynn Parramore has a good roundup of the Lambert fiasco here.) Eddie Lambert's biggest mistake was believing that, in the words of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, "If the company's leaders were told to act selfishly" they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance."
Wrong. It turns out that people who are motivated to act out of self-interest will do whatever it takes to enrich themselves, even if that means damaging the entire society -- in this case, the Sears "society" -- in the process. Sure, competition "works," sometimes, for some things. But the Sears experiment showed us that it works best when there is a fabric which knits the competing parts together into something more than the sum of its parts.
We call that something a nation.
Eddie Lambert's Sears is a nation in microcosm. When its common purpose was lost, the entire enterprise collapsed. Eddie Lambert taught us that that when people act solely out of self-interest, they act destructively toward others, and hurt themselves as well. Everybody loses.
Lambert wanted Sears to teach the nation a lesson, and it did. Selfishness is one of the roads to dystopia.
3. Free-enterprise zones.
The concept of the free-enterprise zone was first popularized by Republican Jack Kemp. Kemp, a football star-turned-House member and vice-presidential candidate (with Bob Dole in 1996), adopted the concept, also known as "urban enterprise zones," as a campaign theme during his initial rise and a 1988 presidential campaign. It's based on the belief that economically disadvantaged areas -- inner cities or impoverished rural areas -- would be revitalized if regulations, minimum wage requirements and tax levels were eased.
This concept is based on two separate but related theories. The first is that employers are likely to be attracted to these struggling areas by the lower cost of doing business there. But a deeper, less frequently articulated theory cuts even closer to theoretical libertarianism: that regulations and taxes are themselves economy-killers. Free-enterprise zones, it was thought, could therefore become laboratory experiments which would demonstrate how much better an economy functions without them.
It didn't work out that way. A few of the zone's tools, such as targeted tax breaks, have provided temporary relief in some instances. But overall, the experiment has been a singular failure. As one roundup of research on zones put it: "Most of the more sophisticated studies show no increases in employment or per capita income."
Instead, the one consistent finding across all studies appears to be this: zones typically made money for one or more corporations, but the promised social benefit in jobs and income never materialized.
That hasn't killed the zone idea, or the many variations on its theme. Statewide initiatives, offered as tax breaks or other incentives, have been equally unsuccessful. The most spectacularly unsuccessful track record in this regard belongs to New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who has offered nearly $2 billion in tax incentives to spur job growth. The result? Job growth in New Jersey lags behind most of the nation, while hundreds of millions in tax breaks went to giant casinos and to large corporations Prudential, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Verizon, and Panasonic.
The zone idea is truly dystopian in scope, and that's the idea which refuses to die. The premise is this: The regions inhabited by low-income brown, black, or white citizens should become places where basic worker protections are nullified, and the financial obligations of the wealthy are relaxed even more than they are today.
If this idea is pursued, the zones will become Third World nations within nations in the North American landmass, de facto colonies which have been insourced for corporate convenience. They'll belch out poisons in their unregulated mines, farms and factories; under-bid one another for jobs and underpay workers while placing them in increasingly unsafe conditions; drain revenue from local, state and federal government; and lower the overall standard of living.
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