Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

4Bones Beneath FleshThe market system is not a place or a thing or even a collectionof things. It is a set of activities of distinctive pattern.Certain customs and rules are required to make a marketsystem, and to the degree that they are observed, a marketsystem exists. Think of them as constituting the skeletonof the market system.To identify these customs and rules is to throw variouslights on the market system. They illuminate, for example,how it could have come into being and why participantsplay the roles they do. The lights also reveal the tight connectionsof the market system with liberty and property,and they place money and entrepreneurship in the system.Let’s start from scratch, building the skeleton one boneat a time.1. Custom and law grant broad (but not equal) control toparticipants over the disposition of their own time and energy—inothers words, legal liberty—in the pursuit of aspirationsor claims of any kinds. You are free, for example, toput your energies into building a house.In that statement there is hardly a hint of cooperation,only of possible mutual injury and the consequent need forpeacekeeping. Nor is there yet a hint of market interactions.Nevertheless, broad personal freedom (of scope andlimits to be discussed later) is a building bone or buildingblock. Without it—peasants under feudal obligations werewithout it—a market system is impossible.