The most telling of Mr. Snobelen's alleged bricks - telling more for what it revealed of his critics than of anything else - came in an address to a group of public school teachers, in which they were urged, as "front- line service providers," to pay closer mind to the needs of their "customers," i.e. parents and taxpayers. You could faintly hear the snorts of the assembled educators as you read these words.

How dare this appalling man talk about schools in the grubby language of commerce? Could he really believe that the sacred vocation of teaching could be reduced to providing a "service"? That parents were merely "customers"? Didn't he know that education is too important to be left to the market?

The vague reference to "the market" is a common rhetorical turn, intended to suggest a strange, disembodied force acting in its own right, independent of the living, breathing people of which it is composed. Often this is the preface to a lecture on the distinction between "consumers" and "citizens," the latter being the far preferable of the two.

The consumer would seem to inhabit a bleak world indeed, the landscape barren of anything save the strip malls and McDonald's he is said to prefer - if one so aimless and distracted could be said to register anything so strong as a preference. On his television there is only sex and violence; in his diary, there is but one entry: Shopping. The citizen, on the other hand, is a stout fellow, much given to licking envelopes, attending meetings and otherwise combining his efforts with those of like mind in pursuit of worthy causes.

Or if that seems too involved, here is a simpler way of telling them apart. Citizens are you, your family and everyone you know. The rest of the ghastly run of humanity is made up of consumers. And so it is vital that decision-making power is reserved to people like us - citizens, that is - and not to people like them. That is what the people who proudly declare their hostility to "the market" really mean: that consumers cannot be trusted.

Of course, the same thing used to be said about citizens, by autocratic critics of democracy. To prefer that decisions on how society's resources should be used to produce goods and services should be guided by the choices of the people who actually use them - consumers - is not to endorse mindless consumerism, any more than democracy is about mob rule. When we speak of markets versus politics, we are talking only of two different models of how economic decisions should be made, not about philosophies of life.

Years ago this distinction was neatly boiled down into two words: "voice" and "exit." Where economic decisions are made centrally, as in a state monopoly, we may each hope to influence how they are made by adding our voice to the general palaver: by voting, or through such intermediary institutions as parents' associations, lobby groups and the like. In a competitive market, on the other hand, we can make our wishes known rather more directly: rather than complain about poor service, we can simply take our custom elsewhere.

What's to choose between the two? One is the presence or absence of coercion. The essence of the market model is that all relationships are voluntary, based on mutually beneficial exchange. Competition, more commonly depicted as the market's essential feature, is merely the means of enforcing this rule. Politics, by contrast, is all about coercion. We call it majority rule because the majority gets to tell the minority what to do: to take their money and boss them about. Sometimes this is necessary: markets can fail. But we should recognize it for what it is.

On its own, this would recommend a general preference for markets over politics: in a market, everyone gets what he wants, even those in the minority. But the matter is compounded by the uncertainty over whether, in politics, the majority even rules. The average citizen votes every four or five years. He elects a government on a vague platform it haphazardly pursues, which is then ignored by its bureaucrats. If he has a specific complaint - a letter that arrived late, say - he has to wait until the next election to get it fixed, and then only if his own concerns are shared by enough other citizens to get it onto the winning party's agenda.

Between elections, the governing principle seems to be which interest group can express its collective rage at being unable to bend the state to its will in the most ferocious terms. If your ideal society is one in which bunches of red-faced people stand on either side of the road and scream themselves hoarse at each another, or if you are especially adept at activism, then you will prefer this model. For the rest of us, it only confirms the increasing obsolescence of coercion as the organizing principle of human affairs.

It's not hard, then, to see why the citizen should be so lionized by those still attached to statist economic institutions, to which consumers, given a choice, seem peculiarly indifferent. A citizen, you see, is a consumer who knows his place.