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Some public functions could be contracted out to private companies. For example, profit-making companies in the U.S. pick up garbage at a lower cost than city sanitation departments do, and United Parcel Service often delivers packages faster and cheaper than the U.S. Postal Service. Economist Walter Heller advocates a market approach to fighting pollution. His idea: levy stiff taxes on the discharge of effluents; the market would reward with high profits the companies that did the most to clean up the environment, and penalize polluters with skimpy earnings or actual losses.
The Virtues of Profits
One of the capitalist market system's enduring strengths is precisely its reliance on the profit motive which, like it or not, is a powerful human drive. To many idealists the primacy of the profit motive has long seemed to be a sanctification of selfishness that produces a brutalizing, beggar-thy-neighbor society. Victorian Moralist John Ruskin denounced "the deliberate blasphemy of Adam Smith: Thou shalt hate the Lord thy God, damn His laws, and covet thy neighbour's goods."
But capitalism has the overwhelmingly powerful defense of simple realism. There is just enough of a "Scotchman" in most people to make them work harder for their own advancement than for the good of their fellows—a fact that regularly embarrasses socialist regimes. The Soviet Union permits collective farmers to cultivate small private plots in their spare time and sell the produce for their own profit. Those plots account for a mere 4% of the land under cultivation in the U.S.S.R.—yet, by value, they produce a fourth of the country's food.
Profits and other incentives are indispensable to any economic progress. A product or service that is sold for exactly the cost of producing it yields no margin to raise wages, buy new machinery or pursue research leading to new products. Only profits can finance that—whether in a capitalist or a socialist society.
The argument between capitalism and authoritarian economic systems comes down to two questions: Which system can make the most efficient use of manpower, materials and money to create the greatest opportunities for free choice, personal development and material well-being for the greatest number of people? And which system is more just and satisfying in human terms?
An authoritarian economy appeals to many human instincts. It offers stability and security at the expense of freedom and a greater degree of economic (though not political) equality than capitalism. It can provide full employment by creating a surfeit of make-work, low-productivity (and thus lowpaying) jobs. It keeps prices stable by fixing them, almost invariably at high levels in terms of real income. Yet even the meanness of living standards in such a system may have a certain attraction for millions of people outside those countries who are repelled or surfeited by commercial values. Distrust of money lies deep in the West's history, from St. Francis of Assisi and the Anabaptists to the modern romantics. Authoritarian economies are as materialistic as capitalism, if not more so, but they are often