If you fancy a free market economy, or a society based on such an economy, best take care that your markets are not rigged.
If politics is the game, it helps if you can name a market that is – or ever has been – truly open, honest and free. Anything else is a fraud.
Britain has been drifting away from the old, comfortable compromise of a mixed economy for the best part of 40 years. It has been the casualty – or the beneficiary, if that's your taste – of a global ideological war. The state, the unfettered market, or some halfway house between the two? The scorecard says the neo-liberal version of the so-called Washington consensus emerged victorious, time and again.
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