Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

80 How It Workscontrols, in some respects highly functional. They alsolearned that private enterprises did not necessarily gain—and often lost—in efficiency when taken over by governmentas owner and operator. Their passion for governmentownership and operation gradually fell off. Even if governmententerprises might be made superior to private, socialistsbegan to believe that they would not be much superior.The path to a better system would have to run in another direction:through the welfare state and reduction of excessiveinequalities in wealth and income, as well as in education,status, and opportunity.As a consequence, a number of societies have privatizeda number of the industries that were socialized after WorldWar II. And they have moved beyond grand debate overbroad programs, such as to nationalize (or privatize) all largecorporations, to debate over proposals specific to a single industryor enterprise.In the meantime, during the noisy debate over privateversus public enterprise, market societies quietly developeda variety of forms of ownership and enterprise. Onewas the enterprise owned and managed by its own employeesor some category of them. Although such enterprisesare infrequent in industry, they are common among serviceenterprises: law, accounting, medical care, trucking, andtaxi services, among many others. In Sweden, for example,worker cooperatives account for all taxi services and, as inIsrael, 50 percent of trucking.Another form of ownership is the agricultural cooperativeengaged in buying and then marketing—and sometimesprocessing—its member-owners’ products. Milkco-ops, for example, also manufacture cheese. In WesternEuropean nations, the co-op share of agricultural marketingis often about 50 percent.