If only the Tories understood how free market economics works

‘I don’t think I’m quite as Austrian as you are,’ a Tory minister said to me the other day. And I knew then that the party is doomed. It wasn’t what he said so much as the way that he said it: in the fond, amused, each-to-his-own tone you might use to dismiss a friend’s enthusiasm for Morris dancing or Napoleonic re-enactment or dogging…

But personally, I think free market economics (of the Austrian or any other classical liberal school) is far too important to be left to wonks, think-tankers and out-there right-wing commentators. So did Margaret Thatcher. ‘Hayek’s powerful Road to Serfdom left a permanent mark on my own political character, making me a long-term optimist for free enterprise and liberty,’ she said. And so did Ronald Reagan. Asked which philosophical thinker or writers had influenced his conduct as a leader, he replied: ‘I have read the economic views of von Mises and Hayek.