Using Markets to Implement Public Policy

Abstract

Scholars in a number of disciplines have documented the wide variety of institutions and practices by which societies have resolved issues of resource scarcity. Traditional societies often rely on inherited roles or other custom-based mechanisms. The state resolves such issues in contemporary socialist societies. In capitalistic societies, markets are seen as the primary mechanisms by which scarce resources are distributed. In the United States this preference for markets is revealed by the extraordinary range of allocative decisions left to the private sector.² Even in those cases where there exists a broad political consensus that some sort of public political process ought to supplement the market, the fundamental ideological commitment to the market remains unchallenged. Government agencies are routinely charged to ‘consider the bottom line’, and be more ‘business-like’. Stress is placed on productivity, efficiency, and other values which are clearly derived from market principles.

A version of this essay was presented at the 1986 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago, Illinois.