Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Alternative Market Systems 263leum refining. Subsidies to the logging industry have theunfortunate effect of speeding deforestation, but they aresupported both by political influence and some genuineconcerns for the welfare of communities that would transitionallysuffer if logging declined. Indefensible or hard todefend subsidies are tucked away here or there in more industriesthan not, gifts to influential industries and enterprises,occupational groups, and communities.State purchases, taxes, subsidies, and other devices fordealing with spillovers increasingly present societies withmajor choices. A society troubled with urban congestionand blight, at least occasional threat of epidemics, fallingsoil fertility, declining forests, exhaustion of mineral resources,and uneasy about global warming might be expectedto step up its efforts to control spillovers. That describesalmost every contemporary society. The growingmagnitude and threat of spillovers has already stimulated around of environmental legislation from North to SouthAmerica through Europe and Africa to Asia. The marketsystems of the world are heavy users of taxes and subsidies,as well as outright prohibitions, to cope with them. TheDutch government, for example, now subsidizes antipollutiondevices in enterprises in Poland and the Czech Republicin order to reduce the air pollution that reaches Hollandfrom them.I do not intend here to enter into the contemporarydebate on when to use market controls and when to use outrightcommands and prohibitions to cope, say, with environmentalproblems. My point is simply that all governmentsin fact use the described market controls broadly forcollective purposes and that every society has choices tomake on how to use them. Obviously nonmarket mandatorycontrols have their place.