We must fight to defend the power of free markets
FOR most of us on the wrong side of 50 Theresa May’s speech yesterday will have come across as a case of stating the bleedin’ obvious. Yes, of course a free market economy is “the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created”.
But then we remember a time when the northern hemisphere was like a split-screen experiment devised so as to prove the point. In the western half there were free market economies where people worked hard, earned money and chose how to spend it, whether it be on cars, fashionable clothes, the latest rock album or whatever.
On the eastern side were societies where people didn’t work so hard because they had little incentive to do so. The state decided for them how they would live, what they could own, every aspect of how they lived their lives.
Back in the 1950s it might have been possible to argue that socialism was a valid rival for capitalism. But by the 1980s the gulf between them was so vast as to be almost comic.
While the free market economies of the West grew, the socialist economies of the East stagnated. Technologically their people were caught in a timewarp, driving juddering old cars – if they could get one at all – and having to do without the consumer goods that we took for granted. They suffered food and fuel shortages, and lived beneath thick clouds of pollution created by industrial plants that obeyed no environmental rules.
AND if they complained they knew the consequences. Dissent was not tolerated. Prison beckoned for anyone who challenged the political system.
The ultimate test in the battle between free markets and socialism came in 1989 when the Iron Curtain across Europe was finally pulled aside. I don’t remember many people rushing from west to east in search of a better life. I remember an awful lot of people making the journey in the other direction.
I am not sure how the subject of postwar Europe is covered in the school curriculum but I would guess not very well to judge by the number of young people who have been won over