Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Freedom? 183(consumer sovereignty). Although both systems practiceconsumer free choice and both make use of markets for consumergoods, only the market system practices consumersovereignty.One might believe that, if our choices as consumers donot control production, we are not really free, no matterhow free we are to choose among the many services andproducts the centralists have planned. I think that positionalmost impossible to maintain, given any ordinary conceptof freedom. In a market society you do not through yourpurchases or in any other proximate way control yourtown’s production of trash-removal service or your nation’sinvestment in space exploration or road construction. Butthat does not make you unfree, although you would claimpolitical unfreedom if you had no control of any kind overthe government officials making the decisions. I suspectthat most French and British consumers do not even knowwhether outputs of milk and certain other farm products intheir countries are controlled by the volume of consumerpurchases or by the size of governmental subsidies for theseproducts. Nor do they regard their liberties as threatened,because either way, they are free to choose from what isoffered. Indeed, the citizens of the democracies have oftenasked their governments to decide outputs and inputs.They have done so, for example, by taxes and expendituresthrough which the state rather than consumers determinesthe production of irrigation water or air transport or someother product. Given democratic governments, the possibilitythat officials might or do plan some outputs does notwarrant a charge of unfreedom, as the terms are usuallyused. We can even imagine a highly democratic society thatchooses to leave the determination of outputs and inputs