Re: Economics and law/bureaucratic order made real

["David B. Shemano" <dshemano@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Doss writes:

>> Why does the Japanese produce better vehicles and the
>> old Soviet vehicles ... as massed produced . . . not
>> specialized .. . were of an inferior quality?  One
>> thread of thought says the Soviet system was inferior
>> to the American system and the Soviet workers were
>> lazy, stupid, culturally backwards and lacked freedom
>> of _expression due to their bureaucracy.  This is the
>> exact argument advanced by a section of the
>> intellectual stratum of Japan against their American
>> counterparts.
>>
>> ---
>> It's not because they were lazy or stupid, it's
>> because they couldn't be fired for doing a bad job. Or
>> most anything else  -- many workplaces had one or two
>> incorrigible alcoholics who would come in to work and
>> be told to sleep it off in the back room. (They were
>> given the worst jobs though.)
>>
>> All Soviet goods were sold with the date of
>> manufacture, and the purchaser invariable made sure
>> not to buy something made after a holiday or on a
>> Monday (to avoid hangover-related shoddiness) or at
>> teh end of the month (which meant everybody was
>> working ful speed to fulfill the plan).
>>
>> Note that in areas where the Soviets _did_ discipline
>> labor -- the military and aeronautics, for instance --
>> their goods were surburb.

The original sentence that got me off and running was the following from Charles Brown:

"There might, in general, in socialism be more focus on some safety issues when the decision would not depend upon how the safer engineering impacted an individual corporation's bottomline."

Now, based upon Chris Doss' explanation of Soviet manufacturing, does not the experience of Soviet manufacturing weigh against Charles' hypothesis?  Would not the Soviet experience suggest an emphasis not on safety under socialism, but an emphasis on job security, which had the necessary tradeoff of lowering the relative importance of safety?

David Shemano