If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, "Hand me the wrench," his co-worker...

If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, "Hand me the wrench," his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, "And what do I get for it?"-even if they are working for Exxon-Mobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs. The reason is simple efficiency {ironically enough, considering the conventional wisdom that "communism just doesn't work"}: if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them.11 One might even say that it's one of the scandals of capitalism that most capitalist firms, internally, operate communistically. True, they don't tend to operate very democratically. Most often they are organized around military-style top-down chains of command. But there is often an interesting tension here, because top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom. The greater the need to improvise, the more

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