【英语生活】驳“大企业不能倒”

Great banks are “too big to fail”. The predictable consequence of governments accepting this argument is a queue of other companies “too big to fail” lining up at the front door of treasuries. Insurers were next. This week, the car manufacturers secured their subsidy.The failure of any business has ripple effects on suppliers, employees, distributors and customers. If the business is General Motorssuch effects are larger. But since GM is many times larger than most companies, the subsidy needed to keep going is correspondingly larger. There is no reason to think that the ripple effects are larger, relative to the size of GM, than the consequences of the failure of a smaller business relative to its size.

So the return on the taxpayers' dollar is not likely to be larger if their largesse goes to a big company. Indeed, since the large company has readier access to a range of alternative funding options, a need for government support is more likely the result of deep-seated competitive weakness than temporary shortage of funds which can so easily cripple a smaller business.

That is true of the carmakers, whose problems are of much longer standing than the current downturn. In automobiles as in many industries, economies of scale are technological, the diseconomies of scale human. Human factors in business are generally more influential than technological ones in determining the long run fate of a company.

The memory of a meeting in one of Britain's largest companies – now no longer so large – is engraved in my memory. We discussed how best to persuade the regulatory authorities of the cost advantages arising from the company's size. But the room was crowded with people who had nothing substantive to contribute. They were there to defend and advance their political position in the corporate hierarchy. The meeting itself demonstrated that the arguments we were presenting were false. Politics overrode productivity.

As has been true in Detroit. Arrogant, complacent and only belatedly sensitive to competitive pressures and changing customer needs, the big three have been in relative decline for half a century.

But there really are economies of scale in political lobbying. The cost of presenting your case is independent of the size of the benefit you seek. The larger the business, the more likely that legislators will see constituency interest or political advantage in being helpful. Big companies have government affairs departments but for small groups the cost of access is prohibitive. Only large companies have access to the sharpest shooters.

Too big to fail, but big enough to exert political influence. The malign consequences are evident in many areas of public policy. Large media and software companies write intellectual property rules, while the interests of users go unrepresented. Big pharmaceutical and defence companies employ thousands of lobbyists. Consumer interests come a distant second to producer interests in the formulation of trade policy. In the past two decades the financial services industry has become the most powerful and effective lobby of all. The cash contributed to political campaigns has now been repaid many times over from the public purse.

But few things corrode business efficiency and effective markets more insidiously than the discovery that it is more profitable to win the favour of politicians than to win the approval of customers. In Italy, and in some other European states, an inefficient large-business sector is parasitic on the vibrant small- and medium-sized enterprises, which are the mainstay of the economy.

The problems are worse in Russia and in many potentially emerging economies. In these countries, the nexus between the political and business elite undermines both democracy and business efficiency.

The populist trustbusters who framed anti-monopoly legislation more than a century ago feared that the cost and technical advantages of large companies would be more than offset by damage to economic efficiency and pluralist institutions from the political power they might acquire. These early trustbusters were right.

大银行“太大而不能让其倒闭”(too big to fail)。政府接受这种理论可想而知的后果是，一长列“太大而不能让其倒闭”的其他公司排队等候在财政部的大门前。下一个是保险公司。最近，汽车制造商将补贴收入囊中。

任何企业的倒闭都会引发对供应商、雇员、经销商以及消费者的连锁反应。如果这个企业是通用汽车(General Motors)，影响就更大。但既然通用汽车的规模数倍于大多数企业，需要维持其运转的补贴也就相应地更多。没有理由认为，与规模相对较小的企业倒闭带来的后果相比，通用破产引起的连锁反应更大（相对于各自的规模而言）。





因此，如果纳税人把资金慷慨地投入一家大公司，回报不太可能更大。实际上，由于大公司融资渠道较多，他们更可能因深层次的竞争劣势——而不是临时性资金短缺——而需要政府支持。临时性资金短缺可轻易导致小企业倒闭。



汽车制造商的情况就是如此，他们的问题比当前的经济低迷更为持久。在汽车业，正如许多行业一样，产生规模效益的是科技，产生规模不经济的是人力。在决定企业长期命运方面，企业中的人力因素普遍比科技因素更具影响力。



在英国最大的一家公司（现在不再有那么大了）开会的经历深深铭刻在我的记忆之中。会上，我们讨论了如何最好地说服监管机构相信该公司规模产生的成本优势。但会议室非常拥挤，挤满了对会议议题没有实质性贡献的人们，他们在那里捍卫并推进自己在企业中的政治地位。会议本身显示出，我们提出的论点是错误的。政治凌驾于生产率之上。



底特律的情况也是如此。半个世纪以来，由于傲慢、自满以及对竞争压力和客户需求变化反应迟钝，三大汽车巨头相对来说一直在走下坡路。



但是在政治游说上真的存在规模效应。陈述你的理由的成本，独立于你所寻求的利益大小。企业越大，立法者越有可能认为选民利益或政治优势有用。大公司设有政府事务部，但对小公司而言，进入的代价非常昂贵。只有大公司才能请到最能干的游说者。







太大而不能让其倒闭，但必须大到足以施展政治影响力。公共政策在许多领域的负面影响是明显的。大型媒体和软件公司制定了知识产权法规，而无人代表使用者的利益；大型制药公司和防务公司雇佣了数以千计的游说人员；在制定贸易政策时，消费者利益远低于制造商利益。过去20年里，金融服务业成为最强大和有效的游说团体。捐献给政治选举活动的资金目前已从国库获得数倍的回报。





但是，当企业家发现取悦政客比赢得客户更为有利可图时，就没有什么更能在不知不觉间侵蚀商业效率和市场有效性了。在意大利和一些其他欧洲国家，一个低效率的大型企业部门寄生在充满活力的中小型企业身上，后者是经济的中流砥柱。





俄罗斯和许多潜在新兴经济体的问题更为严重。在这些国家，政治与企业精英之间盘根错节的关系破坏了民主和商业效率。





一个多世纪前在民意支持下制定反垄断法框架的反托拉斯者担心，大型企业可能获得的政治力量对经济效率和多元化制度造成的破坏，将会压倒他们的成本和技术优势。这些早期的反托拉斯者是对的。



译者/君悦