In support of free enterprise

And the key to sustaining and sustainable economic growth is a free market economy. No other economic system has proved as capable of providing the economic circumstances which allow us to build the future. The history of the modern West is an astonishing and unprecedented story of both wealth and freedom increasing and spreading to an extent once unimaginable. In a free enterprise economy, the production, distribution, pricing and consumption of goods and services are primarily determined by the choices of individuals, whether acting alone or through corporate entities.

Entrepreneurship, innovation and consumer choice ensure that scarce resources are continually employed in a manner which most effectively matches the changing wants and needs of society.

Competition ensures that goods and services are delivered as efficiently as possible, and provides a perpetual spur for innovation and improvements in quality, quantity and efficiency. Resources are directed toward their most effective uses.

Individuals are free to use their income and wealth in any way that they like, to choose to spend, save or give it away, as they prefer.

This is not to deny a role for government in the production and distribution of goods and services.

Governments should ensure the provision of public goods which the private sector would not deliver unprompted or would not deliver efficiently.

They have a role as regulators or service providers in markets which are unlikely to function efficiently in isolation, such as natural monopolies.

Governments in richer societies also ensure that a minimum standard of living is available for all their citizens, however contentious the determination of that minimum standard might be.

Some activities of government clearly enhance people's quality of life beyond what a market system alone might provide.

But the benefits which these government activities deliver do not constitute an argument against free markets, except perhaps against the most blinkered libertarianism.

In fact, the provision of public goods and a social safety net requires that governments have the resources which only a prosperous market-oriented economy can deliver.

It is also worth stressing what a free enterprise economy does not do, and countering some of the unfounded criticisms levelled at it.