ABSTRACT
To influence the pattern of production by their behaviour as buyers is surely the most genuinely democratic way to give power to consumers. There is no direct ‘political’ alternative. There being hundreds of thousands of different kinds of goods and services in infinite permutations and combinations, a political voting process is impracticable, a ballot paper incorporating microeconomic consumer choice unthinkable. Majority votes are in any event undesirable as well as unsuitable. What of minority rights in matters of consumption? Is it proper for the citizens of a town or a country to vote by a 3-1 majority in favour of not providing anything - from string quartets to pumpernickel - which happens to be a minority taste? How can one measure the intensity of desire for anything other than by discovering how much of other things one is prepared to give up to obtain it (i.e. what price is one prepared to pay)? With an acceptable distribution of income, and in the absence of large unearned incomes, no better method for arriving at consumer choice is known than that of allowing the consumer to choose, and (save on far-fetched assumptions of ‘abundance’) this means choosing by using his or her purchasing-power, by buying in shops - what Soviet reformers call ‘voting with the rouble’. The shops, in turn, must then have the means of obtaining the goods their customers wish to purchase. There is not and cannot be anything anti-socialist in the notion that the citizens should seek to satisfy their varied needs and tastes to the fullest extent consistent with the productive capacity of society and the welfare of their fellow citizens (i.e. avoiding pollution and other species of external diseconomies). We have surely established by experience as well as by logical analysis the impossibility of incorporating the fully disaggregated needs of millions of people into a comprehensive (and comprehensible) plan.
