Limits of the market metaphor

Abstract

A paradox pervades our public life. Burgeoning demand for government action coexists with gnawing uncertainty about the purpose of such action and growing uneasiness about its efficacy. The contemporary public lacks both the confidence in government's ability to right wrongs that characterized the 1960s and, despite President Reagan's efforts, the faith in the strength and righteousness of the private order that typified America in the 1950s. Government joins the church, the school, the union, and the corporation as an object of scorn and mistrust. The public has reacted to this conundrum not by rejecting the promise of the welfare state but by wondering if government is capable of fulfilling that promise. The government calendar is crowded with a staggering variety of issues including housing, energy, health care, welfare reform, community development, capital formation, and inflation. In addition, new issues, once viewed as private and not fit for government action, struggle to gain a place on the public agenda. Childcare, homosexuality, prayer in the schools, abortion, and affirmative action have all become objects of heated public debate. They combine with the more conventional "pocketbook" issues to place an unbearable strain upon the deliberative capacity of the polity and the management capability of the government. The roots of this paradox lie in the two dominant liberal public policy doctrines that emerged in the postwar period, neither of which has been able to provide a common set of understandings about the nature and goals of government action. This failure is attributable to the pervasive influence of the market metaphor. Market-derived terms like interest and incentive dominate the contemporary policy-making vocabulary, depriving it of the very language needed to think about public purposes. Market imagery transforms the public's view of itself from one of an active, deliberate citizenry to one of a gaggle of consumers shopping for policies from shelves stocked by government experts. The two policy doctrines adopt differing versions of