Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Freedom? 181The several advantages of occupational free choice incentral planning are not simply hypothetical. Authoritarianas they were, Soviet and Chinese planners made heavy useof conscription and other methods of formal and informalcompulsion. That included forced movement of workersfrom urban to rural areas, massively in Mao’s Great CulturalRevolution. But they also made selective wide use ofoccupational free choice. Their methods of job assignmentwere mixed, as, for that matter, they are mixed in marketsocieties though in entirely different proportions. Marketsocieties limit occupational free choice, for example, whenthey conscript an army or assign young physicians, whosetraining has been paid for by the state, to rural areas.Consumer free choice in a nonmarket system. Havingplanned and produced an output, central planners must devisea method of distributing the planned output. Givingeveryone equal shares of each commodity and servicewould be grossly wasteful. Some persons need clothes andtoys suitable to their infancy, others need the services ofschoolteachers, and others need geriatric physicians. Rationingthrough distributed coupons is clumsy, wasteful,and annoying—and gives rise to black markets. In a centralplanning system, the simplest and easiest method of distributionof output is to distribute money incomes to all inwhatever pattern of inequality or equality the people ortheir rulers wish, and then sell the produced outputs atwhatever prices will clear the market for each kind of output.That grants to consumers the same kind of free choicethey practice in market systems.Again, this is not merely hypothetical, for communistsystems in fact practiced consumer free choice, but they didnot do so broadly, as in the market societies. They often assignedhousing, for example, and many other goods and ser-