Free market education is woefully lacking
Free Market Conservatives | 3 March 2020
I took Politics at A-Level, as a Bachelors, and as a Masters, but never in that time was I introduced to any free market ideas.
I was fortunate enough to have an A-Level teacher who, if not Eurosceptic was at least Eurosuspicious, handing out photocopies of an article about the free movement of filing cabinets between the EU’s three sites.
But that was about as right wing as it got. My politics degree at Queen Mary, University of London was a three-year parade through left wing thought. Marx, Nietzsche, Gramsci, and Marx’s many thought babies that populated every bookshelf with its descendants. Even Central American and South American politics, my favourite classes, were just an exploration of how evil Reagan and George H Bush were, while Sandanistas, Noriega, Castro, FARC were all glorified as heroes. We explored multiculturalism, how we were speciest, and even in the mid-90s, how those of us who were white male were privileged and to be despised.
And at my Masters in political sociology at the London School of Economics, the only mention of any right-wing thought was a casual observation en passant by one lecturer that it was the Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln that had abolished slavery in the United States, but perhaps even this moment of levity was to suggest that the Democrats and Republicans had now switched robes of righteousness. (To be fair, there may have been a reference to Hayek on the reading list for one of the week’s sessions. But this was for anyone keen enough to explore the outer wilds of supplementary reading.)
I mention all of this to say two things. One, when I once interviewed for a role at a prominent conservative think tank in Washington DC, the HR Director listed off a host of names asking if I had read any of their work. I had no recollection of what he said simply because I had never heard of any of them before. And I had worked for a conservative think tank for five years. I probably shouldn’t admit to any of that, but I thought at the time that my communist education probably hadn’t best equipped me for a life in conservative thought leadership.
It was then with some surprise then that I was given a copy of Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist in 2014. Here, finally, was a basic review of the foundations of the free market and a logical, clear, compelling case for the growth of markets as the sole means to secure prosperous growing societies. I actually found the book therapeutic. Years of accumulated misplaced guilt over not eating enough Fairtrade chocolate, recycling every single envelope that came through the door, the carbon footprint of my Israeli green beans, all of it fell away with what the current PM on the back cover describes as a ‘blast on the vuvuzela of common sense’.
Prosperity through free trade, not putting limits in innovation, suspicion of Empires, priesthoods, cartels all presented in the narrative sweep of ten millennia of evolution of mankind.
It is an antidote to climate catastrophising, fear of profit, and the incessant imprisonment of the mind that is the constant activity of left-wing thought. The book should be presented on the national curriculum, available at GCSE in civics, or geography, or politics, or a class on ‘just stuff you should know’. The fact that it took me 40 years to come across something even half useful after a lifetime of British education means that we are letting our children down, providing them a one-eyed perspective on the world. The book, and any like it, should be commandeered by the state and nationalised into civic intellectual property at once. Why, it should even get its own BBC quiz show.
