Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Market-System Coordination 43induced financial enterprises to use funds to support thestock market, it provided money to facilitate the purchaseof houses, and it pressured banks to extend enterprise loans.It took a number of measures to increase the profitability ofbanks, reduce the stock market transaction tax, and createnew tax incentives for high-tech industries. Month bymonth, governments maintain scrutiny and an ever-changingset of policies toward the market system.PeacekeepingDoes the market’s contribution to peaceful order—to curbinginjury—match the cooperation it accomplishes? That isnot an easy question to answer because many people findthe question itself puzzling. Market systems, they will say,typically flourish in peaceful societies. Consequently, thereremains no peacekeeping task for the market system to perform,even if it had a potential for such a function. That is apersuasive line of argument—until one asks how thesepeaceful market societies came to be peaceful.The plain fact is that a collection of people can escapedescending into violent conflict over who gets what (land,slaves, high office, recognition, or whatever) only by developingsocial processes for answering these questions peaceably.That being so, when we see a society at peace internallywe cannot infer that its members lack the aspirationsthat might bring them into conflict. We infer instead thatappropriate processes have been worked out to resolve theirmany conflicts. One of these processes is the market system.It does not simply flourish in peaceful societies; ithelps to make those societies peaceful. Almost three centuriesago Montesquieu captured the idea in his concept of