Any colour as long as it's black

Henry Ford was said that people could buy his cars in any colour, so long as it was black.

I recently saw someone with a "repro" telephone, - a massive black ones, heavy and the same design over a period of years.

We tend to forget the "Post Office Telephone" years when it could take a year f0r the installation of a telephone, and while you were not restricted entirely over colour there was limitation in design for domestic phones. There were no answer-phones, although they had them in America for many years earlier.

Then came BT, etc, and many other companies, followed by a revolution, and so much choice!

This illustrates the difficulty of a one-size-fits-all nationalised supplier. In socialist countries it was true of virtually all goods and services. You could have any colour and design, so long as you had what the state had chosen.

Worse, when something is politically and bureaucratically supplied change and development is resisted as a threat. (In the end in Russia all technology except war technology lagged behind the west because change was resisted as unsettling to bureaucrats. Only in the special shops for party members could you have choice of modern {western} goods.)

There are some who criticise consumer choice, and feel that we should all wear Chairman Mao jackets, despite the fact that it puts power in the wrong place - the producer rather than the consumer. Choice is one element of democracy, even if buyers spend their money "unwisely" as judged by the superior.