What seems to have set him off was a proposal in these pages to cut federal spending by $24-billion over three years. I dare say not every part of the plan was immune to criticism; to Mr. Salutin, however, this is more than a debate about how much government we want or can afford. Nothing less than "society itself" is at stake.

If enacted, he wrote recently, such a plan "would eliminate just about any sense of what makes a society a society." It would make us more like the United States, where "society has all but disappeared." Why, it's, it's . . . just like the holocaust. To worry about a single public institution like the CBC, he writes, is "like being in Nazi Germany in 1938 and worrying about the quota on Jews at the medical faculty in Heidelberg." Yes, the parallels are striking . . .

This may seem like a bit of an overreaction to a proposal that would roll back federal spending all the way to the dark days of 1989, until you realize that all of this fury was really inspired by just one line: that "government should only do what only government can do." I have yet to fathom fully what objection he can have to what seems to me an obvious truism. Unless we think the use of coercive power - the distinguishing feature of government - is an end in itself, we should surely want to keep it to the minimum required.

Mr. Salutin grouses that this "makes government sound like a niche marketer grubbing for a piece of the action after all the other players . . . have taken theirs." For, as he wrote in a second column last week, "there's not much left that only government . . . can do . . . (B)usiness is ready to run schools, hospitals, airports, even prisons and courts." The reason these things should be kept in public hands, then, is not because private firms can't do them, but because they can. And that's bad, because . . . well, because they're not public.

There's no real economic argument in any of this: I don't think even Mr. Salutin would pretend that government runs these things more efficiently. Something else seems to be troubling him: part politics, part esthetics. At times it emerges as a concern for accountability. At others it is expressed in terms of community. Mr. Salutin really does seem to think of the state as the only medium through which we can experience any sense of collective solidarity. Most often, it slips out in snobbish asides about the general grottiness of commerce.

The point isn't that these aren't legitimate concerns. It is that the virtues he ascribes to the state, like the vices of the market, are not unique to each. The ballot box is not the only nor even the best means of holding capital accountable. If statist economics have fallen into disfavour, it is partly owing to the observation that government is inevitably captured by narrow interests, especially capital. For while the gains from a policy in the public interest will typically be dispersed so evenly across the population as to be imperceptible to each, the losses will be concentrated heavily in one sector, whose members will thus have a huge incentive to organize against it.

A competitive market, by contrast, offers a more direct and unavoidable form of accountability: to consumers. Where elections come but once every four or five years, the market is a kind of daily referendum on production, though one where every taste may be represented, not only the majority's. The market is in truth a ruthlessly collectivist instrument: A company either produces a good that people want at a price they are willing to pay, or it is driven out of business. It tempers individual self-interest, not liberates it, forcing each to submit his claim on scarce resources to the omnipresent and incorruptible regulatory regime known as the price system.

It's not clear why voting should be considered a more ennobling means of expressing one's economic preferences than market-based exchange. For most people, the exercise of their consumer sovereignty is the most potent kind of power they will ever possess, the one part of their lives in which they are absolute master. The Salutin model of the economy, on the other hand, is sort of an endless civics class. We wouldn't actually vote on which cola to produce, perhaps, but not far short of it. Oscar Wilde complained that the trouble with socialism was that you had to go to all the meetings. As far as I can tell, to Mr. Salutin, that's the best part.