The Limits to State Regulation

It is now more than thirteen years since I established the Institute for Private Enterprise, which (rather strangely) seems to be the only think-tank in the world with the specific objective of promoting private enterprise as government policy. Stranger still, perhaps, is that I established it because the previous institute for which I was working after I resigned from the Treasury, and which also supported free enterprise in principle, thought I should be less “fundamentalist” in publicly promoting its virtues. That reinforced my view that it is not only the believers in socialism and big government that have to be combated. The recent experience of the Liberal Party seems relevant.      

But the image of fundamentalism painted by outright opponents and even sympathisers is a problem: a not unusual reaction to smaller-government proposals is—“well, yes, but I wouldn’t go as far as that”. I want to suggest some points the Coalition might use in support of the undoubted virtues of…