Choosing Sony

Americans, Hauerwas says, “presume that they have exercised their freedom when the get to choose between a Sony or Pansonic television.”

That’s a cleverly subversive thing to say, but things are not quite as easy as Hauerwas makes them. Consumers may, for all I know, often be this superficial: “I get to choose Sony or Panasonic! What a country!” Though the consumer choosing his Sony may never think of it, the fact that there is both a Sony and a Panasonic to choose – the fact that there are televisions to purchase at all – require an unimaginably complex set of circumstances and institutions.

Someone had to invent the TV in the first place. Then someone had to organize the materials and the production facilities that would produce these objects on a large scale. Then someone else had to organize very similar materials and productive facilities to produce the competitor’s brand. Then someone had to organize the transport to get them to the store where you can make your choice between Sony and Panasonic. And of course, if the TVs are going to be on the shelf for the consumer to buy, the store has to be built, shelves stocked, people and resources managed for retail sales. It’s Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” on a grand scale.

No doubt, this is not an ideal government-free set of activities. Contracts have to be signed; titles and patents are involved; government regulates at every step of the process. Yet, overall, it is an chain of actions, most of which fully deserve the label “free.”

In short, the freedom required for the superficial choice between Sony and Panasonic is far thicker than Hauerwas’s quip suggests.