Every time we go into a shop these days we are presented with an increasing choice. Even if we are buying mundane items, we still have to choose. Try going for a coffee. Chances are you'll be asked about the type of coffee (choice of maybe 5 - 10), the size (thimble to bucket), the sweetness, milkiness, and up to half a dozen characteristics you didn't want to know about. If it's a trendy coffee shop, you'll be asked to choose from a list you don't understand.But it's not your fault that you haven't attended their internal training course for their counter staff. It's really not your fault that you didn't know you have to ask for a regular Americano if all you want is a coffee. But you will be made aware.
Choice is the in thing.But how much choice are you really getting if half of it is of no interest. You are required to engage in a conversation you didn't want to have. You had no choice because if you wanted the coffee, that's the defined way for you to get it. If you don't go through the script, you don't get the coffee. Your choice came down to suffering the sales patter and get a coffee or don't get either.
So how about if all you want is to buy something to wear. Although people often assume there is plenty of choice in clothing, what you can choose from is only the range of goods made available in the shops and fashion is carefully controlled to ensure that there is uniformity. That's the way chains protect their investment. Rather than risk backing a fashion that doesn't sell, retailers will follow the fashion determined at least a year ahead. Your choice is totally manipulated. That's why we see so many people wearing ridiculously impractical clothes - jeans with no wasteband so they're falling down, high heeled shoes that no-one can walk in, short tops that expose the midriffs even in January, jeans with pockets only an ape could reach, enormously wide belts too unconfortable to sit down in, and so on.
Men's fashions are just as ridiculous. Shirts with tears in them, t-shirts with pockets in the middle of your back, trousers with bits of zips or tapes attached almost at random, clothes covered in advertising logos, wherever you look you are faced with much the same non-choice.Even in state provided services, the mantra is that people have to have choice. In education, parents must be able to choose the school for their child.
In medicine, patients must be able to choose where and how they are treated. In reality, if you're ill what you really want is prompt, effective care. Being able to choose is in many ways irrelevant providing you get that care promptly and it's effective, but the illusion of having choice is that it provides some control. Because you are choosing how to consume, you are somehow exercising control.
But there's a difference between exercising democratic control, and exercising market choice. In the former you effect what can happen, in the latter you only affect what happens to you via a product. To exercise democratic control means that people affect the outcomes independent of a market, whereas market choice simply means you have to enter the market and consume before you can affect anything, and then the effect is limited only to your own consumption.
Once market choice replaces democratic choice, and product selection takes the place of democratic control, people lose control over their basic state-provided services. It then becomes very easy to replace those services with a private substitute. Would you like to buy a maths course for your child or perhaps buy a discount double-course version of French. It comes with a free side-salad and a dictionary.
In moving the grounds of politics from political alternatives to selection of choices amongst market offerings, the exercise of political power is passed to those who control the markets, and of course, they then have plenty of choice.
