A Yeltsin aide said that it was during the Soviet leader’s visit to an American grocery store that ‘the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed’ inside his boss.

Writing for Capital Matters today, Matt Lau tackles an argument made by Brad Littlejohn for the Ethics and Public Policy Center:

However, beyond a certain point, more and more does not necessarily mean better and better. Ever-expanding choices may not enhance our freedom, since the mind can only meaningfully distinguish between a limited number of options.

I’m not convinced. The more the merrier. We can cope.

Littlejohn:

Consider, for instance, Netflix, or the cereal aisle at a modern supermarket. At first glance, both of these epitomize a glorious realization of the modern idea of freedom. Here we find ourselves, more than any previous generation, or indeed any previous year, “free to choose,” as Friedman put it. The possibilities before us are nearly endless. But therein lies the problem. All of us are probably familiar with the experience of paralysis that can take hold in these situations and myriad others like them—a listless, restless, aimless browsing that becomes less satisfied the longer it looks and in the end picks a movie to watch, or a high-fructose-corn-syrup concoction to eat, almost at random. But, of course, randomness is the opposite of purposefulness, the opposite of free action. What has happened in situations like these is that the possibilities have multiplied beyond the point where rational choice is viable, particularly given the relatively inconsequential nature of the decisions. 

Not necessarily. If someone ends up picking a “random” brand of cereal, that may be an example of logic at work. Littlejohn correctly writes that such decisions are “relatively inconsequential,” meaning that, as Lau writes, it is entirely rational for the consumer to decide that “the cost of acquiring more information about each cereal is higher than the cost of choosing the wrong cereal.”

Lau:

Of course, faced with more than one choice, people often choose badly. Friedman’s view was that he has every right to persuade someone who is choosing badly to change his mind, “but if I can’t persuade him, do I have the right to force him?” His answer is, “No.”

And here we might imagine Friedman’s follow-up point: If the problem with being free to choose among more than one Netflix movie and more than one type of cereal is that people might choose randomly or badly, what is the alternative? To have the government decide what movies we watch and what cereal we eat? Or some activist somewhere?

It’s well worth reading Lau’s article in full.

As for the “paralysis,” referred to by Littlejohn, I wonder how much of that there really is. And even in cases where it does occur, it might be, well, pleasurable: So much to choose, so much to choose! The “listless, restless [and] aimless” browsers need to get a grip, a sense of proportion and a realization of how fortunate they are.

There are worse things, after all, than a cornucopia, as the story of Boris Yeltsin at a Houston supermarket reminds us.  In 2023, Scott Lincicome recalled how, in the course of a trip to the U.S. in 1989, Yeltsin went to see NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, but it was “a brief, impromptu visit to a nearby grocery store that may very well have changed world history,” by catalyzing his rejection of the Soviet economic model.

Lincicome quotes from Yeltsin’s New York Times obituary:

During a visit to the United States in 1989 he became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by its centralized, state-run economic system, where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare. He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.

A Yeltsin aide reportedly said that it was at that moment that “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” inside his boss.

Meanwhile the abundance in the supermarket aisles has grown still further.

Lincicome:

Between 1975 and 2022, for example, the number of products in an average U.S. supermarket has increased by more than three-fold, from 8,948 products to a whopping 31,530. Not all of that increase is due to globalization, of course, but much of it is. . . . Imports of essentially every type of food have increased substantially in the decades following Yeltsin’s tour . . .

Globalization has even improved our domestic food supply. For example, more than 40 percent of the steel used for canning goods is sourced globally, meaning that many canned foods, although grown domestically, would be more expensive if U.S. producers lacked access to imported materials. American farmers, meanwhile, often rely on imported fertilizer, or use export revenues to fund expansions or crop experimentation . . .