A Restatement Of Economic Liberalism Prologue: Capitalism and the permissive society Introduction :: The Historical Context :: Reasons For Suspicion :: The Rise Of The Word Man :: The Dilemma Of The Economic Liberal :: The New Left Attack :: Poverty And Equality :: 'Alienation' :: Student Dissent :: Contemporary Radicalism :: A turn of the tide?

Yet, although these parallels are ominous, the comparison with the late Roman Empire shows only one of several roads along which we might travel. There are also more hopeful possibilities. The great advance of technology brings with it an immense range of options which were quite unknown to most societies before the twentieth century. For all the excesses cited on previous pages, the spirit of most of those who 'opt out' is more critical, less submissive to some mystical fate than that of the Manichaeans, neoplatonists or early Christian monks.

The instinctive revolt against a life grimly devoted to work and promotion is soundly based. There is a healthy mean between the superstitious worship of the Gross National Product and a belief in the sanctity of poverty. Behind the clichés about the 'quality of life' and 'the environment' is a well-founded suspicion of false goals which we are free not to follow.

The mistake of too many radicals is (a) to underestimate the forces working against the cosy 'New Industrial State' that many business leaders would admittedly love to establish and (b) to overrate the potentialities and gravely underestimate the risk of political accountability as a check on economic power. But their rejection of all the many arrangements and institutions which are neither responsible to the consumer through the market, nor politically accountable, nor subject to known laws, is sound and admirable.

In time they may come to see that the remedy is neither to indulge in nostalgia for a pre-industrial age, nor to talk about 'the revolution', but to promote an effective market in which all costs and benefits are properly priced and which are regulated by deliberately impersonal processes. More simply and crudely, there is a need to restore the entrepreneurial and even buccaneering element in capitalism at the expense of the managerial one. Then, given a proper framework of law, taxes and subsidies, we shall have no more Concordes or other loss-making home-based technological industries and produce more of the things that people actually want, whether these be leisure, peace and quiet, or a less hectic pattern of living, more consumer goods, or some combination of all of these.

The 'guerrilla capitalist' battling against the monopoly of the Post Office or broadcasting authorities is a small sign of a change in the direction of youthful energy and dissent. There are signs that some of those who 'opt out' are trying their luck at small scale entrepreneurial activities of their own, supplying many services on a personal, flexible basis impossible to the large public and private bureaucracies. Certainly the time is ripe for a realignment in which the more thoughtful members of the New Left and the more radical advocates of competitive free enterprise realise that they have a common interest in opposing the corporate industrial state.

There are built-in forces in modern society providing a ready audience for specious anti-capitalist propaganda which I have repeatedly emphasised in this prologue. But in optimistic moods I am impressed by the limits to human gullibility. There is a chance - how large I cannot predict - that the modern mixed economy will develop in a less materialist direction through the development of the attitudes and of institutions of a free society rather than through coercion from above or below. The revolt of young people against the pattern of their lives being decided by others or by impersonal forces they cannot influence is fundamentally justified. Precisely the same arguments are to be found in the classical defences of free markets, private property and limited government. Until recently technological limitations were such that freedom could be important only in the lives of a fortunate minority. It is now possible for all who are not afraid of it.

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