Flight from poverty only a free market could offer
Anthony Fisher may be the most influential man you’ve never heard of. He made possible the Thatcher-Reagan revolution and, 30 years after his death, he is still dismantling barriers to opportunity in developing nations.
As a demobbed RAF officer in 1945, Fisher happened across a copy of FA Hayek’s anti-collectivist masterpiece, The Road to Serfdom. Awed by its logic, he sought out the author, who was at that time teaching economics at (somewhat incongruously) the LSE. Fisher announced that he intended to become an MP and change the world. Hayek told him not to be a bloody fool. Anyone, he said, could go into politics, but Fisher was blessed with something much rarer: entrepreneurial flair. If he really wanted to change the world, he should make a fortune, and then use it to endow free-market foundations.
That’s exactly what happened. In 1955, Fisher founded the Institute of Economic Affairs and went on to set up think-tanks all over the world to advance market economics, many of them supported by the Atlas Network, which he also founded.
On Wednesday, at its annual dinner in New York, Atlas awarded prizes to the best free-market institutes. A Ghanaian think-tank is costing every party’s manifesto commitments, helping end the culture of freebies. Some Canadians are giving aboriginal people a stake in the natural resource wealth of their territories. A Mexican foundation is forcing politicians to declare their assets on taking office. The event underlined a truth that, these days, seems jarring: capitalism is essentially anti-elitist, breaking privilege and dispersing power.
Proposing the toast, I told the story of Fisher’s own business career. He saw that chickens could be bred for meat rather than their meat being a by- product of eggs. Post-war broiler farms, including his, made meat affordable to the poor for the first time.
Leftists sometimes accuse freemarketeers of believing in something called “trickle-down economics”. The claim is absurd: no one argues that the best way to make a country richer is to give plutocrats more to spend on their Lamborghinis. Fisher demonstrated what the market really depends on – “trickle-up economics”. He became wealthy by persuading several poorer people to part with a bit of their income for the sake of getting something they wanted. The transaction enriched him, but it also enriched the many people who had previously had to treat meat as a rare luxury. Capitalism is the only system that rewards you for offering a service to the many rather than sucking up to the few.
The chicken, I argued, is the perfect totem for free-marketeers. Not for its intrinsic qualities – it is fatuous and bellicose, with mean little reptilian eyes – but for what it offers us. Possession of a hen turns a pauper into an entrepreneur. Bill Gates reckons that owning five birds can give an African an income of about £800 a year. Capitalists, in short, are doing what shamans and kings and commissars never could: putting an end to hunger.
The rituals of Remembrance Sunday washed over me at school: few teenagers have much sense of mortality. Now, with the fallen closer in age to my children than to me, I find the same familiar words almost unbearable. I attended a lecture about the First World War last week at my school, Marlborough, which lost 749 old boys in the fighting. Catching sight of some sixth-formers afterwards, I had to blink back tears.
One master, I learnt, wrote 108 obituaries of boys he had taught: an average of two deaths every month for four-and-a-half years. We are not built for grief on such a scale. Among the 108 was Charles Hamilton Sorley, who had been studying in Germany when war was declared. His poem “To Germany” is worth quoting, not because it anticipates Donald Trump’s use of “bigly”, but because it is closer to modern sensibilities than we have any right to expect from a 19-year-old in the trenches:
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each other’s dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind. FOLLOW Daniel Hannan on Twitter @DanielJHannan; at telegraph.co.uk/opinion