Leader: Winter sunshine

1 January 2011

Every day of this new year, some 200,000 people are likely to be lifted out of what the United Nations defines as extreme poverty: living on $1.25 a day or less.

So the world is becoming wealthier, cleaner, healthier and fairer — and very little of this is thanks to the action of government. Addressing the United Nations last July, the Queen remarked how few of the sweeping advances she had witnessed over the past half-century had come about from ‘governments, committee resolutions, or central directives’. The state played a role in certain things, of course. But by and large, improvements tended to come about ‘because millions of people around the world have wanted them’. So 2011, too, should be a year of sweeping advances — because free people, co-operating through the free market, want them.

Capitalism is not, as the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, has absurdly claimed, a vicious dog-eat-dog system. Faith in capitalism is, in effect, faith in mankind — and successful governments have plenty of it. It is creating jobs at home, fighting poverty abroad, nurturing innovations and does not pose a mortal threat to mother nature. We have our calamities, recessions, famines and wars. But overall, we have solid grounds to wish each other a happy and more prosperous new year.