The book (and movie) Fight Club contains, amongst its many attacks on consumerism, the following gem from the employee of a “major” car manufacturer:

You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C).
A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don’t initiate a recall.
If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall.

In the film, Edward Norton recites this to a concerned-looking woman on an airliner. Her look of shock and horror is understandable now that consumerism and profit have become almost taboo. But what is really so bad about this scenario?

On the face of it, a car company is playing risk-assessment with human life. It is the case that this would be exploitative if the resources available to car manufacturers were infinite. However, despite the claims of Marxists who believe that if we all just adopt socialism the earth will give up her bounty (a claim which the current status of the Third World and of our own pre-industrial existence proves wrong, showing that the only way to create the commodities we demand is with increasingly vast amounts of capital and labour), resources are not infinite. As Jean-Baptiste Say demonstrated, when we buy and sell we are actually trading commodities for each other. Money is just a means of extending and easing the barter system, your paycheck is a simple way to exchange your labour for the commodities you desire. The Law of Scarcity tells us that when commodities are finite in supply (as opposed to, for instance, air, which is infinite and therefore not a subject of economic discussion), that supply will never meet demand since human demand is ever-increasing. We already live lifestyles unimaginable to medieval peasants, and yet we unceasingly demand more and better, and always will. The natural human drive for improvement means that want-needs will never be satisfied.

Taking all this into account, it is the case that this “major car company” described by Chuck Palahniuk is merely weighing finite and valuable commodities against each other. It could potentially save more lives by spending more resources, but then these resources would not be available for allocation elsewhere, since resources are scarce. The Law of Diminishing Returns dictates that there will come a point at which more resources allocated to car safety will bring better returns elsewhere, for instance, in healthcare or food hygiene (if they did not from the start). To allocate resources to car safety beyond this point is to actually cost lives, not to save them. Logically, all we need to do to maximise life and safety is to find that point, make cars safe until we reach it, and beyond it to allocate our resources elsewhere. However, it’s a moving target. Advances in airbag technology could make car safety cheaper, union action in car manufacturer labour could make it more expensive, and this quite apart from developments in other industries.

How best to find this point? The Soviet Union clearly demonstrates that a central authority cannot plan these exchanges with even a semblance of accuracy or efficiency. Leaving the Stalinist mass murders aside, countless mistakes have been made by the Soviet leadership that detracted from the welfare of their citizens. For instance, Leonid Brezhnev’s decision to stagnate the consumer-goods economy in favour of a military buildup which Reagan proved he couldn’t win, the disastrous Soviet nuclear power programme (the IAEA finds that the Chernobyl disaster was the result of a faulty reactor design that was nevertheless pushed into service), avoidable casualties sustained by the Soviet military and the space programme even in peacetime, and so on.

Moreover, the point is further confused by the fact that, in our world of scarce resources, many people would prefer to see those resources allocated to things other than health and safety. Excluding the substance-abusers and the extreme-sports people, even someone who forgoes an Audi to buy a Ford so that they can afford a big-screen television or another consumer good has made a similar judgement. Therefore, it makes the most sense to put these decisions in the hands of individual consumers, and this is what free-market capitalism does. You can freely make your choices about how many resources should be allocated to your car safety, Honda and Audi make safer cars than Ford and GM, but they cost more - you make the choice! You could decide that Honda is past the point of diminishing returns, decide to buy a Ford and put the change into your healthcare, except, of course, that in Canada we have Soviet healthcare, so you can’t do that - bureaucrats make that decision for you, with consequences recognisably similar to the long string of disasters that marr Soviet history.

In short, while it might seem cynical to weigh human life against money, as Palahniuk implies, this is not what is being done at all. The real situation is that choices about how best to allocate scarce resources for best health and welfare are being made, and in the free market they are being made by those in the best situation to assess them: the people who those choices directly affect.