The Market as Prison

Abstract

SUPPOSE just to limber up our minds -that we faced the fanciful task of designing a political system or a political/economic system that would be highly resistant to change. How to do it? One way that can be imagined but only imagined is to design institutions of such excellence as would satisfy us without further amendment and would do so under all possible circumstances in a rapidly changing world. To identify such a possibility is to discard it as hopelessly visionary. Another possibility might be somehow to place all power in the hands of a despot or oligarch, who would thereafter deny citizens any capacity for changing the system. But doing so would of course enable the elites to change the system, and we know that some elites are more eager for change than some masses. Another possibility is simple and fiendishly clever. It is to design institutions so that any attempt to alter them automatically triggers punishment. By "automatic" I mean that the punishment follows from the very act intended to change the system. Punishment does not wait for anyone's deliberation on whether the change is acceptable or not. Such a change-repressing system would be all the more effective if the punishments were strong; if they took the form of over-responses, like the tantrums of a spoiled child raging at even mild attempts at parental control. How fanciful is that possibility? It is not at all clear how such a simple concept could be made effective in actual practice. Consider some of our institutions. There seems to be no way to make such a mechanism work in the case of schools. We are indeed sometimes punished in our attempts to improve them in that the attempts sometimes fail and make the situation worse. But that is not