Sunday, October 24, 2021

Markets and Freedom — Chris Dillow

One of the great political changes of my adult lifetime has been the right’s abandonment of free market economics, as illustrated by the government imposing trade frictions within the UK and putting up the tax burden to what the OBR says will be “its highest level since Roy Jenkins was Chancellor in the late 1960s.” Two books I’ve read recently pose a question: might this shift be due in part to an awareness that markets are no longer the foundation of freedom we once thought they were?...
Interesting contrast between libertarians of the right like Friedman, Hayek and Thatcher, and libertarians of the left, here Marx in particular.

Libertarians of the right assume that freedom is the highest value and that freedom is maximized in a market economy under freed market capitalism. Libertarians of left assume that freedom is the highest value but that freedom is maximized in a socialist society with genuine democracy, that is, governance of, by and for the people, with a strong bill of rights to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority.


Stumbling and Mumbling
Markets and Freedom
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle
https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2021/10/markets-and-freedom.html

5 comments:

Peter Pan said...

Protectionism is the norm, historically speaking.
Only hard core libertarians are for open borders, which goes way beyond the current fetish for 'free' trade.

Peter Pan said...

Blogger proof link:
https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/

Tom Hickey said...

Tried target:…. Fail

Fixed it and tested it.

Ahmed Fares said...

Will Rogers visited Russia in 1926. He noticed that they hadn't got rid of hierarchy, but that it remained in a different form. People learned to work around the system.

"Over there, in Russia, everybody gets what he can get, and where he can get it, and it takes two to watch one, and then four to watch those two." —Will Rogers

Socialism works in theory, it doesn't work in practice.

Peter Pan said...

Dictatorship of the proletariat sounds like a hierarchy. But they (supposed prole vanguard) were slow in implementing that objective.

Once Uncle Joe made his move, the rest was history.