Abstract
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and its communist satellites, Jeffrey Sachs and Janos Kornai advised the new regimes in these societies to institute economic and political competition by command. Competition by command is competition that is intentionally created by legislative mandate. Critics of Sachs and Kornai have implicitly assumed that enduring competition can be created if a gradual approach is used in the right circumstances (e.g., the case of the United States) and therefore have focused their attacks on Sachs' and Kornai's “shock therapy.” In contrast, this article uses the history of the United States to argue that the most predictable result of even piecemeal adoption of formal rules aimed at mandating political or economic competition is the emergence of informal social, economic, and political processes that undermine the very attempt to create competition by command.
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