are not doing it. Therefore they will not be in a position to compete in the market. These are matters which are inherent in our capitalist systems. There were experiments with laissez faire in Britain in the nineteenth century, when people actually took their own rhetoric seriously. But they pretty quickly called it off. It's too destructive. DB: So you're saying that this class of managers is impervious to the bridges literally collapsing on the homeless and tunnels bursting under the city of Chicago? Not because they're bad people, but because if they stopped being impervious to it they wouldn't be managers any more. Suppose that the CEO of some big corporation decides he's going to be a nice guy and devote his resources from that corporation to the homeless people under the bridges that are falling down or to global pollution. DB: He's out of a job. He's out of a job. That's inherent in the system. These are institutional facts. If you want to watch this at its more extreme limits, you should take a look at the World Bank plans on pollution. These recently surfaced. One of my favorite issues of the New York Times must have been February 7, back in the business section. There was a report called something like "Can Capitalism Save the Ozone Layer?" Ozone being a metaphor for saving the environment. The question was whether capitalism could save the environment. That was a story by their financial correspondent Sylvia Nasser. The World Bank had come out with a consensus report for the rich countries on a position to take at the Rio conference in June on the global environment. It was written by Lawrence Summers, the chief liberal economist from Harvard. The idea is that the rich countries should take the position, led by the World Bank, that the problem of pollution is that the poor countries, the Third World, don't follow rational policies. "Rational" means market policies. Many of them are resource and raw material producers, energy...
