Otra entrada para mutualistas. En la última edición del Cato Unbound (siempre muy recomendable) Roderick Long es el autor de cabecera con un artículo sobre las corporaciones y el mercado. Su tesis: los liberales son muy indulgentes con las corporaciones, cuyo tamaño y éxito en el contexto actual se debe más a la intervención del Estado que al libre mercado. El artículo es realmente bueno, como todo lo que escribe Long. Pero nunca encuentro persuasivas las especulaciones de los left-libertarians y mutualistas en el sentido de que en un mercado libre puro apenas habría corporaciones y las pequeñas empresas y otras formas de organización como las cooperativas serían mucho más prevalentes.
Peter Klein, que bloguea en Organizations and Markets, ha escrito una nota crítica sobre esas especulaciones. Klein es un economista especializado en teoría de la empresa, y rara vez se pronuncia en términos especulativos. Curiosamente el mutualista Kevin Carson (la principal referencia de Long en este tema) es uno de sus lectores habituales y siempre toma muy en serio sus comentarios. Carson y Long debería tomar nota.
Certainly large firms benefit from the state. But so do small firms. Corporations are under stricter antitrust and regulatory scrutiny, are more likely to be the victims of political rent extraction (in Fred McChesney's sense), and are subject to stricter disclosure requirements (SOX being only the most visible, recent example) than their smaller competitors. Small firms benefit from state-funded incubators, SBIR awards, regional development grants, and a host of other interventions designed to foster "entrepreneurship." Trade barriers, war, state control of education, and a host of other interventions retard the international division of labor, reduce stocks of human capital, and lower the marginal product of labor, all of which reduce the scale and scope economies that favor large-scale production.
Which set of effects outweighs the other? It is impossible to say, ex ante. The firm on the purely free market could be larger, more vertically integrated, and more hierarchical than the typical corporation under the mixed economy. Moreover, the worker-owned cooperative, the partnership and proprietorship, the decentralized "open-production" system, all suffer from serious incentive, information, and governance problems, almost none of which are mentioned in the anti-corporation libertarian literature. I suspect this literature's preference for small-scale production is based primarily on aesthetic, rather than scientific, grounds.
Klein también responde con contundencia a Long en los comentarios:
Roderick, I do think our disagreement is thymological, but not exclusively so. I mean, we can do better than Dilbert, can't we? There's a huge literature on the purely economic benefits and costs of alternative organizational forms, on firm size, scope, and complexity, on centralization and decentralization, and other organizational and managerial issues. I find it frustrating that you seem unwilling to engage this literature, or even to acknowledge it, while making sweeping statements like the one quoted above.
In particular, I'm baffled by the left-libertarian fascination with worker-owned and -managed cooperatives. As I mentioned in my post, this strikes me as a purely aesthetic preference -- power to the workers, down with cubicles and pointy-headed bosses! -- without much basis in the theory or historical practice of actual cooperatives. Again, there's a big literature on the economic organization of cooperatives. Even today, in the "corporatist" economy, they dominate in some sectors, such as agricultural production and processing. Like any form of organization, they have benefits and costs. They're no panacea!
My guess is that in a hypothetical society in which cooperatives were the main organizational form there would be a funny cartoon about the mind-numbing inefficiency -- the endless group meetings, the continual arguments among stakeholders, the culture of complacency -- in the coop world.
Los que sigais el debate también podéis leer este post de Klein en respuesta a Carson, sobre los efectos de la intervención estatal en el tamaño de las empresas en el sector de la agricultura. La conclusión de Klein, contra Carson, es que el Estado beneficia más a las empresas pequeñas en ese ámbito, y que un mercado libre vería aumentar el tamaño de las empresas.
Vendrá una segunda parte de esta entrada porque Long ha contestado a Klein.
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