Capitalism has won: we just can’t admit it

The best book on the free market couldn’t teach even bankers to love it, says peter briffa

Walk into any high street bookshop and you will find at least one row of books denouncing global capitalism. Environmental pessimism and warmed-over socialism: this stuff sells by the bucket-load. Books by Naomi Klein and George Monbiot really do become worldwide best-sellers. So where are the books by the capitalists?

Here's one. Eamonn Butler, the director of the Adam Smith Institute, has decided to fill the gap with his new, short, and deceptively simple volume, The Best Book on the Market, proudly subtitled "How to Stop Worrying and Love the Free Economy". Dr. Butler doesn't quite come out and say that greed is good, but it's as close as makes no difference.

This really is capitalism made easy. Nonetheless I found it strangely depressing. Perhaps it was the feeling that it made its case so well, so logically, that really there was nothing that Gordon Brown could

quibble with. Maybe even Fidel Castro, in his retirement hacienda, would nod approvingly as he turned the pages.

Most politicians now, in the West and beyond, pay lip service to the idea that the market has won, that socialism has - regrettably - been proved to have failed. Small government is in. There are limits to centralised knowledge. These mantras are repeated by neo-con and neo-socialist politicos alike.

Yet for some strange reason they all seem to think that somehow if they buck the market, and if they do it in a caring and compassionate way, somehow the market, just this once, won't buck back.

What with Barack Obama hinting at restoring protectionism in the US, and Gordon Brown guaranteeing Northern Rock shareholders, as well as his 'British Jobs for British Workers' sloganising, it still seems that when push comes to shove, government, after all, still has a duty to step in to correct 'market failure'.

Is it just because politicians can't stop