John Cruddas MP at The Guardian:
The future demands an active state redistributing wealth to balance a dysfunctional economy – the Labour Party’s founding principle.
As I have written, our economic system has been subject to too much of the wrong state intervention, so capitalism cannot be blamed for a dysfunctional economy. What has failed is an excess of state intervention in a system fundamentally flawed through reliance on credit expansion and through firms growing so large they surpass market forces, only to be rescued from their folly by the taxpayer acting under duress.
Believers in liberty under the law must seriously refute proposals for increased intervention and make the case for fundamental reform back to a capitalism which allows market forces to act. As Reagan said:
You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down — up to man’s age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
