Every morning except Sunday, I delivered newspapers to the residents of my street, collecting the money on a Friday evening. One Friday evening, a lady customer who I remember by virtue of her tight sweaters and ample breasts (such things make a big impression on a 16 year old lad!), asked me what I wanted to do when I left school. I replied: "I want to be Prime Minister." She asked me which political party I would lead and, when I answered that the Labour Party would be the beneficiary of my considerable talent, she laughed said something to the effect that I would change my political views as I got older.
Actually, she was right!
I inherited my political views from my Father. Dad was a Labour Party supporter and active within the Post Office trade union. He is a kind, compassionate man and I believe that he honestly thought that socialism, as represented by the Labour Party, was the political system most able to care for the individual. As a point of interest, his Father, my Grandfather (who was known as "Fromp" to his many Grandchildren), was a committed Conservative voter and fan of Enoch Powell. He took the Telegraph newspaper (Conservative leaning) whilst my Dad took the Daily Mirror (Labour leaning).
As I got older, I began to think that politics was incapable of solving societal problems. All political parties seemed to morph into the same entity with the same policies. I slowly began to see that all political parties were, at heart, socialist and that socialism did not work. My research delivered shocks such as discovering that Fascism and Communism were actually the same system; after all, the Nazis were "National Socialists" by name.
So if all politicians are socialists and socialism does not work, what is the solution? Is there a solution? What is the point of being involved in politics if politics itself is the problem?
The epiphany moment came for me when I realised that all our failing political systems were based on the importance of the majority over the individual and where Governments were increasingly intent on intervening in aspects of economic life. Nowhere practised a system where the individual had primacy, where government relegated itself to protecting individual persons and property against assault and confiscation by force or fraud.
One organisation that has helped me to understand this is the Ludwig von Mises Institute. The institute is named after a leading Austrian economist, a school of economics which champions a true free market economy (where government and economics are kept apart). In fact, the more I see of the writings of Austrian economists, the more I am convinced that their ideas hold the key to a more just economic system.
One champion of Austrian economics is Ron Paul. Watch the interview below, where he makes a key point about politicians. If they were to admit that their efforts do not work, they would put themselves out of a job. Therefore, they must continue to pretend that "Big Government" is the answer and that the State must have more power to intervene in our lives in order to correct the problems which, it can be argued, were created by government intervention in the first place. This in turn justifies bigger budgets and more bureaucracy, meaning more taxes and a lower standard of living for us all.
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