Margaret Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore discusses the former Prime Minister’s legacy. Moore provides insights as to how Margaret Thatcher’s stance on the market economy developed and how she popularised it. He seeks to outline her approach to foreign affairs, in relation to the EU, the US, and her broad approach to the Cold War.
IS STATE INTERVENTION IN THE ECONOMY INEVITABLE? | CIS
Peter Boettke teaches economics at George Mason University. He writes that ongoing economic woes demand drastic reduction in state intervention into free markets:
The great expansion of trade and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has produced a level of material wealth that enabled the cost of government intervention to be offset, and remain largely hidden to many observers. This possibility is not a new phenomenon. Adam Smith pointed out long ago that the power of self-interest exercised in the market economy is so strong that it can overcome a ‘hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.’ But it is important to stress that the great material progress realised over the past 100 years was not caused by the expansion of state invention into the economy but in spite of those interventions. And the tipping point is when the number of ‘impertinent obstructions’ grow from hundreds to thousands so that the market economy can no longer hide the costs of the folly of human laws.
It is important to distinguish between state intervention in the free market and state regulation of free markets. Regulation is essential for orderly functioning of the market place. Compare the early days of stock exchanges to the benefits of current regulation regarding insider trading, market manipulation and stock flotation. State intervention, on the other hand, is disruptive to the orderly functioning of markets — distorting price signals which can lead to massive imbalances. The most obvious recent example of state intervention is the Fed suppression of interest rates in the early 2000s which led to a massive property bubble and global financial crisis in 2008.
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