Another book launch

Another week, another book launch. This one is a collection of essays about Lord Harris of High Cross, tributes to his activity in bringing the ideas of free market to Communist and post-Communist countries. Published by the Centre for Research into Post-Communist Economies (CRCE), the slim tome (another one) is edited by the Centre's Executive Director, Lisl Biggs-Davison.

The tributes are fulsome and varied and the collection, as a whole, gives a very good idea of how the free-market think-tanks and new ideas in those countries that seemed to have no hope at all, enmired in Communism as they were, began to wake up. Ralph Harris was instrumental in waking them up and in providing them with a reason for getting out of bed and facing the day.

Markets are good for you

Here are two tales that are related in theme and to the book I am reviewing after a fashion. Not long ago I had a frank and open discussion with a couple whom I have known for some time. Highly educated academics and teachers, they are vaguely on the left though not extremely so. The discussion was about the fact that they could not do anything about turning the lease they held on their very pleasant Central London flat into a freehold and, indeed, had to obey the rules set by the freeholder, in this case the Grosvenor Estate.

Obviously, they sneered, your belief in the free market is quite wrong as it can result in a situation like this. The husband then pointed out to the wife that probably I did not think that she should want to live in Central London. I explained that I had no views on that subject but thought that the pros and cons of every situation had to be weighed up.

If one aspect of what you owned was overwhelmingly important then you simply accepted what might be the downside. If you really wanted to own that ultra-chic Zac Posen outfit then you did not mind paying the fabulous sum extracted for it, assuming you had that sum available. If that meant not going on holiday that year, so be it. If it meant getting into debt and paying interest, so should be that.

Similarly, if you wanted to live in Central London, you had to accept that there were very few freeholds available and the rules on the various estates tended to be quite stiff. But there were many advantages.

What the lady in question felt, though she denied it, was that the free market ought to let her have what she wanted, as long as she was prepared to pay, without any disadvantages. In other words, she wanted to abolish the whole concept of exchange and of property rights, both of fundamental importance, in order to extract more than the maximum benefit for herself. She would have liked to do away with “search costs” and “transaction costs”, all of which have to be taken into account in a voluntary exchange that is a true market. Probably, she and her husband would have liked to see some legislation on the subject.

They certainly wanted to abolish the whole concept of inheritance as it seemed very unfair to them that people should acquire property without having worked for it. Once again, it proved impossible to explain, though several people tried, that the benefit of one’s heirs may be one reason why one prefers to work and accumulate property or to look after it.

The other tale concerns that utterly useless institution, the London Assembly and London’s street markets. One of the committees produced a report on those markets. It remained unread by all except those who were duty-bound to do so. In my days of One London Blogger I did read it and comment on it.

The report seemed to mourn the fact that many “traditional” markets did not do well and there were empty spaces. Something had to be done about that. As it happens they also let slip that farmers’ and specialist markets were doing rather well and new ones were opening all the time. Yes, but that was not the point. They were not “traditional” markets and, anyway, that was just markets developing in response to customer demand not according to the rules as defined by the wisdom of the London Assembly and its members.

As part of that report, the committee members visited Shepherds Bush Market, with which I am well acquainted. As it happens, the market has not been doing terribly well and, naturally, the fault lies in someone else – TfL, who owns the land, various shops around there and, of course, the not yet opened new shopping centre around White City. This is all rubbish, though TfL does seem to have reneged on some of its contractual obligations, which will not surprise our readers. (Sorry, that’s Transport for London.)

Curiously enough, one of the complaints to the committee, whose members spent a whole morning at the market but did not notice that it had lock-up shops as well as stalls, was that the various stallholders all bought the same goods from the same wholesalers. The complaint came from the stallholders themselves, who clearly did not think that they should do something about it, even if they were losing customers.

They, too, thought that someone should help them out because they had not been able to keep another cardinal rule of market economics: provide choice and anticipate customer demand.

All these people, the highly educated professor, his equally highly educated wife and the less than well educated but reasonably smart stallholders should read Eamonn Butler’s new book: “The Best Book on the Market”. It is easy on the brain though not on the eye, what with random pull-quotes on every page. Dr Butler is the Director of the Adam Smith Institute and a world-renowned wonk on the free market.

The book explains the market as a physical entity and as an idea; how they work and why nobody loses out. It deals with the various problems and the way the state and certain private enterprises can mess the process up – think subsidy, high tax, over-regulation, price control and wage control. In the end, even those who think they benefit do not.

We have seen the outcome of continued price control in the recent bread riots in various countries. We know the problem of farmers reacting to subsidies rather than consumer demands. We know the difficulties a monopoly or monopsony can cause. And we know which countries have grown rich and developed well in history: those who traded.

Naturally, no everyone will like this book despite or because of the ease and clarity with which the ideas are explained. There are many eurosceptics, for instance, who would like to introduce a great deal of protection and substitute HMG for the EU as giver of subsidies.

There are those who think that African countries should stay in poverty in the name of glorious self-sufficiency, otherwise known as subsistence economy. Their only hope is to weigh up where their relative advantage lies (hint: labour intensive production as labour is so cheap) and trade.

Finally, there are those who are simply afraid of freedom for themselves and, even more frequently, for others.

For all of that I suggest that as many people as possible read Dr Butler’s very slim tome. A great deal can be learnt from it. Oh and you will love the subtitle: “How to stop worrying and love the free market”.

Did France betray its principles?

Every country’s, every nation’s view of itself is illogical; every country’s dealings with other countries exhibits quirks and incomprehensible peculiarities. But it often appears that France is the least logical and most quirky of all the European states in its self-perception and its foreign policy.

Some of it is straightforward enough. It is not Britain that has experienced difficulties in finding a role after losing an empire so much as France. The end of its empire was prolonged and agonizing, involving as it did, two expensive and destructive wars that left deep scars on the country. (In the former British Empire the wars came after the British had left, which, one might argue, shows how sensible or, alternatively, how perfidious they are.)

Before that came the French defeat in 1940 and the occupation with all its moral and social problems that have not yet been worked out properly, as we have written on different occasions.

We have also written about French reaction to the political catastrophe of the Suez adventure and the American role in it. This is covered extensively in “The Great Deception”.

So, a good deal of French behaviour can be attributed to a desire to restore the country’s pre-eminent position in at least some parts of the world, a position that was last in evidence in 1814 despite subsequent French colonial wars. Coupled with it is that strong feeling of resentment against les Anglo-Saxes, the British and, particularly, the Americans. In fact, there are times when it seems that the sole purpose of French foreign policy is to annoy the government and people of the United States.

There are, however, complications. One is the European Union, perceived by many of the French elite as the weapon through which France will dominate European politics and become a great power again. Many of its political structures, economic policies and attempts at foreign policy appear to be largely French in their origins. But they are, as it happens, problematic. To a great extent EC rules can be ignored but not totally and France has been suffering economically from her own policies and from those enshrined in the European Union’s legislation. This has contributed to the rather vicious problems in the banlieus, inhabited largely by North African and Middle Eastern immigrants and their descendants.

Another complication is French self-perception, at least, as it manifests itself among the political elite (though, as we know in this country, what the elite thinks does percolate down to the people in one form or another). Part of that self-perception is French political superiority because of certain events in the second half of the eighteenth century. No need to argue about that here but, it is worth noting, that many of our ideas of equality and democracy grew out of those events. So the French do have a great deal to be proud of. But have they, themselves, lived up to those great ideals? David Pryce-Jones, the historian, journalist, novelist, expert on the Middle East, thinks otherwise and marshals his evidence in “Betrayal – France, the Arabs and the Jews”.

The rest of this longish piece about this excellent book can be read here.

The heroes of not long ago

Sometimes it is hard to believe that my generation can recall a time, not so long ago, when the United States had a great President, the United Kingdom a great Prime Minister and the Catholic Church a great Pope. As it happens, I am an admirer (without being a Catholic, so no accusations of conspiracy, please) of the present Pope and think that the Catholic Church will probably do well under his leadership. I have less faith in the incumbents of the other two positions.

John O’Sullivan’s book “The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister”, subtitled “Three Who Changed the World”, published last year in the US is now available in Britain. It covers the last years of the Cold War, the period when, with extraordinary fortuity, the West was led by three giants.

There is, as O’Sullivan points out in the book (and did so again at the British launch last week), a curious parallel between the three. For various reasons they and all around them were convinced that they would not be able to reach the top position in their chosen field for somewhat peculiar reasons. Partly the reasons had to do with age (Reagan) or sex (Thatcher) but partly it was because they were too much of what they were supposed to represent. Reagan was “too American”, Thatcher was “too Conservative” and Karel Wojtyla was “too Catholic”. Not much room for the middle ground there.

The three achieved their positions of power and responsibility within a relatively short time. Karel Wojtyla was elected to be Pope in October 1978 and took the name of John Paul II; Margaret Thatcher was elected in May 1979 becoming Britain’s first woman Prime Minister on May 4; Ronald Reagan was elected in November 1980, taking office in January 1981.

There were other parallels, not least the fact that all three narrowly escaped with their lives in assassination attempts. John O’Sullivan describes what might be viewed as a series of coincidences, though he chooses to see it otherwise at the beginning of Chapter Three, entitled “Did God Guide the Bullets?”

If life were a supernatural thriller, the next plot twists would have been expected. Twenty-six months separated the elections of John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher began her premiership roughly in between. Fewer than three months (to be precise, seventy days) separated Reagan’s election and the attempt on his life by John Hinckley on March 30, 1981. John Paul II narrowly survived an attempted assassination a mere forty-three days later, in May 13. And three years later Thatcher escaped unharmed when an IRA bomb intended to kill her exploded in the Grand Hotel in Brighton on October 12, 1984, killing five people and wounding many others, including her close friend and ally Norman Tebbit.

There is an almost cinematic neatness about this series of crimes. In The Omen or The Exorcist they would be readily explained as the forces of Satan seeking to destroy the apostles of hope before they could do too much good (though a more formulaic film director than God would have insisted that Satan move his attempt on Thatcher’s life up to 1981). This slightly eerie impression is reinforced by the extraordinary narrowness of the escape of all three intended victims. At least two of those intended victims believed that God had intervened to preserve their lives, and guided their later action by the light of that belief.

Assassinations have sometimes altered the course of history; the First World War arose from one. On these occasions, it was the failure of assassination that may have altered history.

The book traces the preceding and subsequent careers of the President, the Pope and the Prime Minister, laying special emphasis on the Cold War and the fight against the Soviet Union with its many tentacles. It is worth reading this book if only to remind oneself of the many, seemingly disparate problems, crisis, upheavals and wars, that were, in reality, caused by the activity of the Soviet Politburo and its minions in various countries.

It is, as it happens, worth reading the book, anyway. Some time ago, on another site, I described it as the “must-read” for all conservatives. Actually, it will be the “must-read” for all those who are interested by the way the Cold War was won (even if we do seem to be losing the peace) and to whom the ideas and ideals of the West are dear even when the actual events seem to be going the wrong way.

The story weaves its way through public and private events, relying on written accounts and personal reminiscences, not least those of O'Sullivan himself, former Daily Telegraph journalist and former speech writer to the Iron Lady. In case we have forgotten, there is a good deal about the sheer venom that all three had to suffer from throughout the years of political power and, in the case of Reagan and Thatcher, afterwards. The whirligig of time brings its own. Who will remember all those silly snobbish comments about Thatcher being a grocer's daughter and, therefore, rather vulgar or Reagan being nothing but a second-rate Hollywood actor (which is untrue in itself - he was much better than that)?

One of the extraordinary aspects of this book, and it is a tribute to the author, is that I found it an exciting read, despite remembering very clearly all the major and many of the minor events described in it. What is going to happen next, one keeps asking oneself, while knowing full well the answer.

Let me quote some words of Ronald Reagan’s (observant readers of this blog know that I am something of a fan of his) from the speech he made to a group of World War II veterans at Pointe du Hoc, on June 6, 1984:

Here in this place where the West held together, let us make a vow to our dead. Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for. Let our actions say to them the words for which Matthew Ridgway listened: “I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.”

Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their valor, and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.

Who could put it any better? As it happens, one of the Great Three is still around and was present at the launch, looking extremely well in a purple outfit, ready to talk to anyone who wanted to and equally ready to sign the book for anyone who plucked up courage to ask. (Oh yes, the author did get a look-in.)

It is, I cannot help feeling, up to us to ensure that the legacy of the President, the Pope and the Prime Minister is not dissipated. Yes, I know, the first question that will be asked is "who is this we, paleface".