Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Necessary to Democracy? 231right, that does not explain their two-hundred-year dominance—manydominant opinions are false, and manytruths never become dominant opinion.In recent years, it is now sometimes said, communistfailures have finally persuaded citizens and elites in allcountries of the necessity of a market system. But communistfailures in the late twentieth century cannot explainwhy in earlier democratic societies, to whom those failureshad not yet been revealed, opinion in favor of the marketsystem was already dominant. In any case, the failure of authoritarianismin communist nations has little to say aboutwhat democracies can and cannot do. It does not explain theuniformity of opinion.One can understand that the many millions of peoplewho live well in market systems and observe that marketsystems are wealthier than nonmarket systems would notwish to displace the market system. But millions of marketparticipants do not live well, are not obviously better offthan they might be in a nonmarket system. Yet even theydo not join in turning against it. Even in the misery of theGreat Depression of the 1930s, in some countries only aminority of the unemployed called for ending the marketsystem.Nor is the dominance of pro-market opinion to be explainedby the absence of an existing alternative system thedefects and merits of which could be compared with thoseof the market system. Without a successfully operating alternativesystem to turn to, no doubt some people and theirgovernments would not want to make a leap into the unknown.But such caution hardly explains why no people ortheir government at any time chose the nonmarket unknown.The establishment of the United States, the FrenchRevolution, the Russian and the Chinese revolutions all