Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

176 What To Make of Itin the market with my earnings? Yes, I may have boughtthem. But if so, my earnings were shaped by earlier prior determinations.Custom and law prohibited some kinds ofearlier transactions while permitting others. They also decided,through taxation, how much of my earnings I couldkeep; more important, they decided whether I entered intomarket life with my parents’ assets. Law and custom oninheritance represent a mammoth prior determination ofmarket outcomes. There is no escape from death or fromthe effects on each participant of custom and law on inheritance.Every generation begins its market life with a set ofassets, tiny or massive, specified by custom and law on inheritance.What one can produce in or take from the market systemis always a consequence of a network of prior determinationseven wider than we have discussed. Henry Ford wasable to provide millions of people with low-cost cars onlybecause the state undertook massive road building, withoutwhich the market demand for autos would not have grownas it did. Bill Gates could not provide the objects and servicesof Microsoft nor become a billionaire by doing so if hissociety were illiterate. That a society is not illiterate is insome large part the consequence of nonmarket decisionsthrough custom and law, among them those on education.The results of market performance, even of an industrial genius,depends in part on prior determinations that are neveroverridden or washed over—they never expire.In the theater of efficient social coordination, Act I belongsto the state, in which, half blindly and not efficiently,it makes the prior determinations that set the course for thenext act. Act II belongs to the transactions of the marketsystem. A long act with much audience participation, it