At Quadrant Online, Gina Rinehart blogs about Rupert Murdoch’s speech to the Institute of Public Affairs:
I arrived in Melbourne in good time to neaten up for a dinner function celebrating the IPA’s 70 years. Although it seems a long way to fly from Tokyo for dinner, it was fantastic to see so many friendly and enthusiastic people. Thank you to all the friends and new friends who came to chat with me.
I spoke briefly, but it was the other speeches that made the night so worthwhile, including the address by IPA award winner Rupert Murdoch. He said the sort of things Baroness Thatcher would have appreciated because, like him, she strongly believed free societies are moral and socialism is not.
The speech she was talking about said this in main:
How often have you elected political leaders to fight against some horrible regulation or tax, only to watch as they basically agree to a watered down version of what their opponents are arguing?
Placating a nation is not leading a nation.
So long as we allow the debate to be framed by people who think the market is efficient because it is based on a human failing, we are going to lose every argument.
The only way to uphold market freedom is to show people that the market doesn’t succeed because of greed. In fact, it’s just the opposite.
The market succeeds because it gives people incentives to put their own wants and needs aside to address the wants and needs of others. To succeed, you have to produce something that other people are willing to pay for.
Of course the socialists would have you believe otherwise.
Matt Ridley is a British author who has given great thought to these issues. He wrote a famous book called The Rational Optimistthat many of you must know. He points out a few simple facts:
First, that today by almost any measure you can think of, people on this planet are better fed, better sheltered, and better protected than they’ve ever been – and that prosperity has really accelerated in the last 100 years. lndeed, that the average person’s standard of living has improved ten fold – yes, ten fold – in the last century.
Second, he says that the key is simply trade, or the interchange of goods, services, and ideas among people.
Let’s put this in human terms. Recently the World Bank reported that in 1981, 42% of people in the developing world had to live on less than a dollar a day. That is one-and-a-half billion people in poverty or starvation.
Thirty years later, the percentage has been reduced to 14%, a huge change in a relatively short period of time. What could be more moral than that?
This is unparalleled in history. Read more »
