LETTER : Political odyssey back to the past
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Your support makes all the difference.From Mr Geof Rayner
Sir: Until they read "Big Daddy government is out of date" (8 May), your readers will have missed something that Financial Times readers like myself have enjoyed over recent years, namely journalist Michael Prowse's transformation from avid defender of the welfare state faith to free market evangelist, an odyssey all the more remarkable for being conducted through the pages of a national newspaper.
I think I detected the break some years back when Prowse, in his role as reporter of the American condition, reported the views of conservative social scientists who railed against the tendency of US inner-city blacks to dwell upon the wretchedness of their slums and to seek government hand- outs. It would more advance their interests, Prowse was told, if blacks joined the great wagon train of self-improvement by physically leaving the ghetto behind. Prowse was attracted by their idea that while poverty was certainly a problem, state paternalism made it worse.
Since then Prowse's intellectual and moral quest for a new antistatist order has let him to consort with the ghosts of Adam Smith, Alexis de Toqueville, the more recently departed Friedrich von Hayek, and the all- too-alive Newt Gingrich. Although it all sounds like good old laissez faire to me, we are told that this "superior" approach to the problem of life, the universe and everything is named libertarianism.
If I have a problem with Prowse's conversion to these ideas, it is not because I disagree with the need to decrease state centralism and to increase the scope of voluntary activity. My problem is the Prowse seems blind to the fact - as de Toqueville was in his day - that private institutions wield powers often as great as the state, and against which the state can offer the ordinary citizen protection, while the economic and personal power of some individuals can be many times greater than others. In this regard
Prowse raises the issue of economic power only to dismiss it. If the GDP shrinks he tells us, it is irrelevant because "what matters is that pattern of activity reflects peoples' free choice". Prowse should know this is hokum just by watching the world around him.
Yours sincerely,
GEOF RAYNER
London, SW17
8 May
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