Reply #31: Little or no choice of brands of different things [View All]

Little or no choice of different producers of similar goods and services.

An old Soviet joke was that the most exciting thing about Soviet television was wondering when the television would explode. If you didn't like the poor (and dangerous) quality of those televisions, your choice was pretty much whether or not you owned a TV. Unless you bought a foreign-made TV on the black market (and I don't even know if any foreign-made TVs were compatible with Soviet TV broadcasts), you couldn't reward and encourage the quality of a competitor with the way you spent your money.

Because of a ridiculous system of measuring productivity by consumption of resource, a Soviet producer of camping supplies made metal cookware that was thick and heavy -- utterly unsuited for the purpose of the product. They'd never have survived in a capitalist economy thinking that way, and shouldn't.

This is not to say that capitalism produces perfect products, or that distortion of monopoly power in capitalism can't have similar effects. Capitalism, however, stands a much better change at producing higher quality goods and services at good prices.