Brittan stands firm through the years

NOT many commentators could fail to be embarrassed at seeing their pieces collected into a book. It is a measure of Sir Samuel Brittan’s calibre that his articles glow like perfect diamonds as prescient and wise. They even seem to improve with age. He confesses minor editorial tweakings but none to alter the substance. Here is one of the best economic minds available to us. He manages to be sage as well as subversive.

Brittan believes in the merits of the free market as an adjunct to the more important priority of liberty. People free to choose their own ends will collaborate through voluntary means. His thought processes have little or no connection to the brittle utilitarianism of the "businessman’s view". The CBI gets only one dismissive reference.

The essays are so diverse it is not possible to prcis them. I am impressed by his two articles on Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek. Ayn Rand was by far the most daring exponent of individualism, or as she termed it "Selfishness". I have simply never encountered a British intellectual to give Rand a mature consideration let alone read her books. She still outsells any other exponent of capitalism through her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Brittan concludes she is mistaken but still has value as a tonic in small doses or as a purgative in a full dose. Her novels are certainly good for young minds doubting the market society we all enjoy.

The essay on Hayek I found perceptive and touching. Hayek was almost drummed out of the economics profession for denying the predictive powers of economics. He regarded it as a fraud. The social sciences cannot match the physical ones and we know now their "certainties" are provisional.

Hayek’s Nobel Lecture, The Pretence of Knowledge, must be the best explanation of extreme modesty about what we can know since David Hume was writing in Edinburgh.

There is a rich seam here in exploring how knowledge is transmitted and deployed in markets rather than command structures.

In his affectionate but critical piece on Bertrand Russell, he detects the foolishness of the hyper-intelligent but sees his virtues. He says of Russell’s witty A History of Western Philosophy that we need something as irreverent but informed on economics. May I urge Sir Samuel to start making notes towards such a text? I can think of no better author.

I hug myself with pleasure when Brittan ridicules the fatuities of "common sense economics" so beloved of businessmen as they talk in favour of "exports", "competitiveness" or "productivity". Just when corporate flannel-masters are talking what they regard as self-evident wisdoms, they are only polishing fallacies. Brittan terms this dunderheid policy prescription as "business economics". He says they are little more than self-serving beliefs by business spokesmen or out-of-date sermonising by politicians. I imagine he has never encountered the extraordinary twisted language of the Scottish Executive and I’m sure he would regard every Scottish minister as talking only Lumpeneconmics.

We await the moment when Sir Samuel renounces the European Union or rather the crazed bureaucracy of the Commission. I wonder if it is just good manners towards his brother, Leon, who ended up a commissioner in Brussels, that deters him from applying Cobdenite ridicule to this sausage machine of autocracy? The Financial Times, his base, has long been muddled about an institution that promotes free trade as an ideal but is protectionist in practice.

Samuel Brittan concludes no amount of economic training will stop official voices reciting nonsense as there is a sort of market for banality. He also detects what he terms "sector snobbery". This is usually expressed in the assumption that "manufacturing" is somehow more virtuous than services or that exporting factories are more useful than importing agencies.

In a book that invites many quotations, I will only select one long one as it confirms what I like to term "Blundell’s Law" - that all political interventions achieve the opposite of their official purpose.

After explaining how the minimum wage rules close down job opportunities for those at the margin, he writes: "What the [New Labour] government found it difficult to appreciate was that the cumulative effect of a great many individual measures, which in themselves might have been desirable, produced an irritating and cost-increasing business environment. Unfortunately, the governments praetorian guard was not as familiar with the economic analysis of government failure as it was with the standard writing on market failure."

There is a sense in which the book is mis-named. Against The Flow reflects a life dedicated to what we might call his Whiggish or Libertarian views. These were being slowly eclipsed through much of his life. Yet the intellectual tide has turned. Socialism as a model has simply expired, though our landscape is littered with its debris such as municipal schooling or the public provision of medicine. The flow is very much going Sir Samuel’s way.

What is perhaps the long-term or slow-fuse message of this delicious collection is the warm humanity and sympathy of the man. He would abhor the description of "Right Wing". Samuel Brittan is that rare and valuable creature: he has the kindly benevolent instinct of the better sort of Leftie but with a mind long marinated in wisdom and observing human nature as it is. It remains an elusive mystery but we all serve each other better by chasing our self-interests than any mirage of altruism enforced by authority.

Against The Flow by Samuel Brittan is published by Atlantic Press, price 25.

John Blundell is director general of the Institute of Economic Affairs.