Competition/Emulation

 


 

[1944]  F. A. Hayek,  The Road to Serfdom, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1986

-  "The liberal argument is in favour of making the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of co-ordinating human efforts, not an argument for leaving things just as they are. It is based on the conviction that where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other. It does not deny, but even emphasises, that, in order that competition should work beneficially, a carefully thought-out legal framework is required .... Nor does it deny that where it is impossible to create the conditions necessary to make competition effective, we must resort to other methods of guiding economic activity. Economic liberalism is opposed, however, to competition being supplanted by inferior methods of co-ordinating individual efforts. And it regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known, but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority." (p. 27)

-  "By destroying competition in industry after industry, this policy puts the consumer at the mercy of the joint monopolist action of capitalists and workers in the best organised industries." (p. 30)

 

[1958]  Wilhelm Röpke,  A Humane Economy. The social framework of the free market, Oswald Wolff, London, 1960

-  "Behind the façade of the market economy people are still, consciously or unconsciously, promoting a development which leads to bureaucratic rigidity and the omnipotence of the state." (p. 29)

-  "The worst is that the disturbances caused by intervention are often taken as proof of the inadequacy of the market economy and so become a pretext for more and stronger intervention." (p. 34)

-  "Competition may have two meanings : it may be an institution for stimulating effort, or it may be a device for regulating and ordering the economic process. In the market economy, competition is both, and it constitutes, therefore, an unrivalled solution of the two cardinal problems of any economic system : the problem of continual inducement to maximum performance and the problem of a continual harmonious ordering and guidance of the economic process." (p. 95)

 

 [1965]  Estes Kefauver,  In a Few Hands. Monopoly power in America, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1966

-  "There is real price competition in a market where a giant firm is faced by a few tiny rivals, but it is conspicuously absent when the giants face each other alone." (p.167)

-  "An increasing number of important industries in our economy have acquired - and are continuing to acquire - a built-in immunity to the forces of the market. In a variety of ways the dispossession of market controls by administered prices is taking place; in each case the effect is to insulate the industry against price competition ..." (p. 203)

-  "... the very fact of competition is a spur to innovation. Where an industry lives under the shelter of monopolistic restraints, it has little real interest in the genuinely novel advance." (p. 220)
-  "At least up to now no better system has been devised to protect the public than the competitive system." (p. 233)

-  "The distinct advantage of the market as the instrument of control is that, in its way, it constitutes a form of representative government. It allows the massive aggregate of the country's consumers to vote their preferences by extending or withholding their custom. And where there is a multitude of independent producers each vying for business, there need be no cause for concern; the market will issue its decree of survival or downfall with utmost impartiality." (p. 234)