I brought this, interesting and easy to read, book on the
recommendation of James Delingpole in his weekly article in the Spectator.
The basic preface of the book is that throughout history,
from witches to capitalism, people have needed scapegoats that become a
focus of attention on which to blame the problems they face.
The current anti-capitalist movement blames capitalism for
all life’s ills and as with all scapegoating their criticisms of capitalism
actually make things far worse. Capitalists are not perfect but largely left to
their own devices they do more good in the world than bad and are certainly preferable
to government initiatives and intervention that so often make matters worse.
Furthermore the more the government restricts and penalises capitalists, to
pander to the anti-capitalists, the worse things become.
On page 117 there was a pertinent paragraph that was
applicable to THA:-
“Every anti-capitalist knows that no colonial government has
ever achieved anything more than questionable results in the course of
intervening in its conquered nations economic affairs, Yet, strangely,
anti-capitalists fail to draw the correct general conclusions , i.e. that the
economic planning of rulers tends to be woefully inadequate when it comes to
fulfilling the needs of millions of citizens. The best decisions come from free
people, who are more motivated to improve their lives than a government
supposedly acting on their behalf. And whereas free people can adjust quickly
when things go wrong – leading to innovation and progress - government planners
adjust slowly, if at all. The government workers who have the largest incentive
to respond to feedback are (elected) politicians, but the temporally distant
threat of being unelected hardly compares to the real-time incentives faced by
free people trying to succeed for themselves. Meanwhile government bureaucrats
have a large incentive to lie to their bosses about the results of the
politicians’ policies; no one gets promoted for reporting failure to a senior
bureaucrat. When you add in the fact that all government workers are tempted to
keep public money for themselves rather than spend it on the public, or at the
very least to spend it profligately so as to demonstrate to the budget holders
that the money was ‘needed’ and will be needed again, the prospect of
enlightened government planning recedes into negligibility.”
This paragraph confirms for me the advantages of a smaller
localised government and a free people directly able to influence their rulers
when needed.
THA’s six demands will improve our system
of governance for the better which is why they are so needed.
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