Whatever the outcome of the American presidential election, one thing is
certain: the fighting of it will be the most significant political event of
the decade. Last week’s Republican national convention sharpened what had
been until then only a vague, inchoate theme: this campaign is going to
consist of the debate that all Western democratic countries should be
engaging in, but which only the United States has the nerve to undertake.
The question that will demand an answer lies at the heart of the economic
crisis from which the West seems unable to recover. It is so profoundly
threatening to the governing consensus of Britain and Europe as to be
virtually unutterable here, so we shall have to rely on the robustness of
the US political class to make the running.
What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic premise of the
politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market economics and a
democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic formula in
which the wealth produced by the market economy is redistributed by the
state – from those who produce it to those whom the government believes
deserve it – has gone bust. The crash of 2008 exposed a devastating truth
that went much deeper than the discovery of a generation of delinquent
bankers, or a transitory property bubble. It has become apparent to anyone
with a grip on economic reality that free markets simply cannot produce
enough wealth to support the sort of universal entitlement programmes which
the populations of democratic countries have been led to expect. Free markets have certain dimensions that basically reward success and punish failure. When Government intervenes to prevent failure for a few, albeit allegedly to prevent failure to the many, and extends to the many more than just a safety net, then we are doomed as a society. The alternative has not been thought through. There is no viable alternative to a free market, some have been tried and abandoned. The germ of a free market is the individual entrepreneur, and the death of that entity shall result in the death of the market, with as one says no Plan B available to take over.
From the illogical arrogance of Ms Warren the Harvard Professor, what else one may ask, to the Rasputin like control of some in our political system, we are faced with a clear choice, one which we may not be able to put off without facing oblivion.
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