From Will Hutton today:
At the launch of his new think-tank ResPublica, "red Tory" Phillip Blond, basking in David Cameron's approval, said that one of the three cornerstones of a new conservatism was the moralised market. He fiercely criticised the tendency to size and monopoly in unregulated free markets in which the only criteria was narrow static economic efficiency. There needed to be more diversity and genuine competition. Small was beautiful. A libertarian view of the world, he said, had allowed too many mergers to go through.
Some right wingers get it: libertarianism as most on the right and in economics promote it is harmful to well-being.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
I’m not really sure that Phillip Blond could be said to be on the right wing of anything (although he’d fit as comfortably on the right of a Blairite Labour party as on the left of the Conservatives) but there is a point here.
I’m not sure that his target is really libertarianism per se, unless you take a very narrow and economic reading of what libertarianism is, and even then I’m not sure it’s quite on target. One must remember that a limited liability company is not in any sense a person – it’s a privileged actor granted a corporate shield by government fiat. It is by no means unreasonable for society to expect some quo for this quid.