I picked up some groceries today from a large supermarket. It took a while to find the cream cheese among the huge refrigerators full of luxurious food at modest prices.
This reminded me of a TV programme just after the Cold War, in which a Russian family visited Britain. The father wept openly on his first visit to a supermarket: he had never seen so much food of such quality, never mind at affordable prices, available to anyone.
We have a Third Way mixed economy, burdened as it is by tax, regulation and big state activity. As the Communists celebrate the crisis and call for more intervention, of a different kind, we might do well to remember that free market capitalism serves the needs of the many, not the few, in a way that state planning failed to do.
