Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Notes 281low for the inescapable (at least so far) imprecision of language insocial discourse and even in social science that exaggerates disagreement,you will find a solid core of agreement. O’ Neill’s TheMarket includes an excellent bibliography on the market systemin its relation to “ethics, knowledge, and politics.”If almost everyone seems to know that legal freedoms to makechoices are necessary for a market system, a long history of controversyover property rights, in which property rights are attackedas a pernicious feature of an exploitive capitalism, leaves alegacy of confusion. To make market choices, consumers have tohave property rights in money, as well as in the things they buy.The attack on property distinguishes property rights in productiveassets, in the “means of production,” from these personal propertyrights. The means of production, the argument goes on to say,ought not be in private hands.Whether the means of production are in public or private hands,to organize production through a market system requires that somepersons or authorities, whether government officials, corporations,or individual entrepreneurs, have legal rights to make use of, sell,buy, or rent productive assets. These legal rights will necessarilybe very much like present rights to private property.Some objections to property rights are of a different color: theobjection is not to the rights but to the grossly unequal distributionof them in all existing market systems, an inequality thatmight be greatly diminished in future forms of the market system.On property, see Tom Bethell, The Noblest Triumph: Propertyand Prosperity Through the Ages (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998);and Gregory S. Alexander, Commodity and Propriety: CompetingVisions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776–1970(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).Chapter 5. Enterprise and CorporationOn corporate size and structure, see Bennett Harrison, Lean andMean: The Changing Landscape of Corporate Power in the Age ofFlexibility (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and Scott R. Bowman,The Modern Corporation and American Political Thought: Law,Power, and Ideology (University Park: Pennsylvania State UniversityPress, 1996).