Perhaps not only corporations need to compete to improve overall quality, but perhaps economic systems need to compete as well, think of it as meta-competition in the hyper-marketplace. Socialism and the union movement arose as a response to the abuses of capitalism. The more extreme philosophies like Communism severely challenged capitalism and it had to respond by humanizing itself and becoming more socially responsible. I don't think it's a coincidence that the rise of socialism and communism roughly coinciding with the twentieth century forced capitalism to moderate and that is what saved capitalism in Eurpoe and America from what happened in Russia. In America, in particular, the influence of socialist thought, exercised through democratic political institutions, is precisely what made US capitalism so powerful and efficient. The workers felt they benefitted from the market and that they had a real stake in it. America has always been a liberal country, by European standards, most labor and consumer legislation as well as social welfare concepts came from America, and it did this without expropriating capitalism. Communism did not reform capitalism, it just scared the hell out of it and it reformed itself.

But Communism is now on the dust heap of history, and deservedly so, and European socialism may have gone too far the other way too; without the checks and balances of ideological competition, capitalism, particularly in the USA, has been doing everything it can to revert to it's 19th century ways. Again, the rise of neoconservatism roughly coincides with the decline of the Soviet Union, not that there isn't a cause and effect relationship as well, but the two ideologies influence and interact with each other. The neoconservative agenda is not just anti-collectivist, it rejects any and all political or social monitoring and control of the marketplace. It will not even tolerate discussion of it. They are attempting to establish an ideological monopoly and we listen to them at our peril.