Spencer Heath Archive

Item 752

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath, title supplied.

April 9, 1956

COMPETITION

     Competition is a very essential device of nature, especially during the process of the organization of industry into more efficient and thereby into larger units of organization. As the organization of industry develops into larger and more efficient units, competition becomes less and less serviceable to the public in the degree that organized industry discovers that profitableness increases directly with the increase of service and advantages to its customers. In the degree that this becomes a realized fact and management discovers the increasing advantages to itself through increasing advantages to its clientele, it automatically passes beyond the discipline of competition to secure that result.

     Thus competition among suppliers may be looked upon as an interim device on the part of nature, pending the higher and larger organization of industry and its conscious discovery of the identity between self-interest and the interests of those whom it serves. Politicians attempting clumsily to enforce competition where it is no longer necessary or useful is an example of one of the evils attending political intervention under demagogic motivation into the natural processes and evolution of society.

     However, nature always holds competition in reserve for the corrective discipline and also for the advantage of those organizations, if any, whose management lapses into indifference to the welfare of those whom it serves, and thereby into neglect of its own best interests.