This morning on the radio I stumbled upon veteran UK broadcaster Katherine Whitehorn’s impossibly grand voice condescendingly calling into question the value of markets.

Here, if you can face it, is the full text of her Point of View.

Off she goes:

Political correctness has long been condemned, often unfairly, for the absurdity of always saying person rather than man or woman, for trying to be polite to minorities, or for refusing to call anyone top of the class for fear someone else weeps for being bottom.

But this isn’t the real political correctness – what’s really been the only politically correct thing to say under Mrs Thatcher, and under Tony Blair, is to assume that competition is better than co-operation, that it’s the only useful spur to action.

On and on:

We are heading, it seems, for bad times such as we had in the 1970s. Then the main trouble was that the unions could disrupt anything and everything at will, and flabby management seemed unable to do anything about it.

But we still had the best broadcasting in the world, a health service which had only suffered two exasperating reforms, an education system widely respected and an efficient civil service not subject either to the stodginess or the questionable integrity of civil services elsewhere.

I have always thought history will find it odd that, in those circumstances, Britain decided to copy the practices of commerce, and model all its institutions on the thing it did worst.

Apart from the unremitting tedium of this Viewpoint, it is strange that KW pits ‘competition’ against ‘cooperation’, and that she appears to assume that ‘cooperation’ = state-owned/run organisations and them alone.

Competition is no enemy of cooperation. It usually expresses cooperation. It compels phenomenal examples of cooperation round the planet.

I have just been to Tesco. Every product of the myriad items sold there (including a lively Polish food section) has arrived there via sophisticated minute-by-minute cooperation between myriad firms and their myriad employees.

Or take YouTube and all the other ‘community’ sites now flourishing. What is that other than spontaneous cooperation arising from countless spontaneous competitions of designs and ideas between clever people and networks?

KW’s trite mistake is to confuse hopelessly pricing mechanisms, public ownership and public control, private incentives and private ownership. The examples she gives are a mess.

Listen carefully, Katherine.

Any system incorporates incentives, positive and negative as well as implicit and explicit. Every activity has an opportunity cost – you can do only one thing at a time and therefore the ‘cost’ of doing that is the benefit foregone of not doing something else.

The main problem with state-run systems is that their incentive structures necessarily tend to be stagnant, limited and clumsy – hence the manic proliferation of ‘targets’ we now see, as an attempt to pep things up a bit.

Plus we see what we see, and measure what we can measure.

The NHS saves the lives of thousands of people every year, but who counts the opportunity cost of lives lost because the NHS does not offer certain treatments or pay for certain drugs?

As state-determined education – largely free from competition – steadily dumbs down exam and learning standards, who counts the opportunity cost of future jobs and opportunities lost because our children are too poorly educated to be fully effective as grown-ups?

So if you are saying that our beloved BBC, health service, civil service and education system are all now notably worse than in the 1970s, you might like to ponder the thought that maybe this is because the inefficiencies inherent in running massive systems in this way have compounded up alarmingly.

You can’t seriously be saying that the trivial ‘competition’ elements battened on to these inefficient structures over the years (eg outsourcing cleaning in hospitals) have caused the problems you identify.

Can you?

Which is not to say that outsourcing cleaning is necessarily a good idea. It is good to promote loyalty within organisations from top to bottom.

But maybe again the proliferation of UK/EU officially-inspired regulations on ‘health and safety’ and other things themselves have created a context in which cost-incentives encourage managers to go for it?

Large-scale emergencies put everyone to the test. Does state-run ‘cooperation’ out-perform privately incentivised cooperation? Not necessarily.

And so on.

Ho hum.

No surprise I suppose that Ms Whitehorn is given such a prominent platform to ramble on in this feeble way against competition by the BBC, an organisation which raises its funding via a poll-tax on all TV viewers rather than by competing normally in the market-place.