This year's G20: getting the fundamentals right

This progress is partly due to better science and technology; and partly to the constant aspiration to do better.

Mostly, though, it's been driven by the intellectual and philosophical conviction that freer trade and smaller government will strengthen prosperity; the instinct that empowered citizens can do more for themselves than government will ever do for them.

Essentially, officialdom has begun to grasp that human freedom is less a threat than an opportunity.

As soon as people have economic freedom, they create markets.

Markets are the proven answer to the problem of scarcity.

They rest, as Roger Scruton has recently observed, "upon the kind of moral order that arises from below as people take responsibility for their lives, learn to honour their agreements, and live in justice and charity with their neighbours".

Even though the Crisis was the gravest economic challenge the world has faced since the 1930s, it was not a crisis of markets but one of governance.

It was the G20 which helped to coordinate the actions which prevented another great depression.

The challenge, as we continue to work through the weaknesses that brought on the Crisis, is to strengthen governance without suppressing the vitality of capitalism.

The Crisis, after all, has not changed any of the basic laws of economics.

The lesson of recent history, whether it's the collapse of Soviet-style communism, the phenomenal growth of Asian economies, or the slow and painful recovery from the Crisis of 2008 and 2009 is that real progress is always built on clear fundamentals.

You can't spend what you haven't got.