Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

182 What To Make of Itvices were so arbitrarily underpriced as to give rise to shortages.The result was that consumers had to engage not insimple market purchases but in special legal and illegal relationswith suppliers. Yet people obtained a great range ofgoods and services through market choice. Not for lack ofconsumer free choice but because of political tyranny werethe subjects of communist regimes unfree.If authoritarian communist systems practice a range ofconsumer and occupational free choice, democratic planningsystems, hypothetical as they seem to be, presumablycan do so, and much more broadly. I make the point not toadvocate such systems but to make clear that these marketliberties, although they require markets, do not require themarket system. Democratic central planning is, of course,not wholly hypothetical. Today’s market societies are markedby “central” planning of production to the degree thatsubsidies, regulations, and prohibitions—from shoppingmalls to medical care—give the state a strong central handin resource allocation and output determination yet leavethe consumer with free choice.We can conclude that these freedoms do not belong tomarket systems alone but are found in both authoritarianand democratic forms of central planning.A frequent confusion is to be avoided. When planners offerconsumers free choice among those goods and servicesthat central decisions have chosen to produce, they do notoffer what economists call consumer sovereignty. By definition,central planning denies consumer sovereignty. Thedistinction is between a system in which consumers choose(consumer free choice) among those objects that plannershave chosen to produce and a system in which consumerpurchases themselves determine what is to be produced