After Brexit Vote: What is the plan now?
One of the most common comments of the Remain camp during the referendum was:
"If we leave Europe, what's the plan for the economy?" and "What is the economic plan from the Brexit camp?"
The answer is simple: Free markets don't have plans. That is the point about free markets.
The key word in the phrase, 'free markets', is FREE.
The opposite of Free markets is PLANNED markets. ie Planned economies.
In order for an economy to be a planned economy, you need a group of people to sit in a room and figure out the economic plan to be followed by every member of the economy.
In the EU that means that the bureaucrats think that they are to write an economic plan for 508 million Europeans to follow. The plan is delivered to the people in the form of regulations, directives and laws. The more planned an economy is, the more regulations, directives and laws are imposed on the population. The government machine grows ever more powerful and the power of individual members diminishes as a consequence.
Planned economies are by definition not free. Planned economies require that every person in the economy follows the plan.
The opposite of a planned, state-ist economy, is a Free market economy, whereby each individual member makes his or her own plan for their own lives. So 65 million individual British people write their own individual plans, which combine to form an organic "UK National Economic Plan".
In a free market, the National plan is NOT the ONE plan worked out in secret, it is the sum of 65 million plans worked out by the public, in every house up and down the country.
In such a free market the government does not issue endless directives, and regulations. Instead each individual business and shopper decides how he or she will make and spend their time and money.
So here is the key point:
In a free market economy, we don't need, nor want politicians and bureaucrats making the Master Plan, which all members of the society are forced to accept.
In a free market the people are free. The government is a servant of the people.
In Planned economies, the all-powerful ministers of state, write their economic plans and We The People, are told exactly what we can do, and exactly how to do it. In planned economies the government officials grow ever-more stronger at the expense of individual choice.
In NOT Planned, ie Free market economies, the opposite is true: The individual liberties are protected and the power of the government officials is restricted.
NOT planned, free market economies deliver power to the people.
Planned economies by definition deliver power to the planners (ie government officials).
In a Planned economy the people are not free, they are required by law to follow the plan.
So if you hear anyone asking "Now we've left Europe, what's the plan for the economy?"
The correct response is "We plan for a free market economy and set the people free to make their own plans for themselves."
As Abraham Lincoln said:
This nation, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
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free market economy
In economic policy, a free market economy is a type of economic system where people and firms own resources, trade by choice, and let prices rise or fall with supply and demand while the state mainly protects law and property.
CG4D Definition
Context: Economic policy
Genus: Economic system
- People and firms hold private ownership of land, labour and capital
- Buyers and sellers enter trade by choice without force
- Prices move with supply and demand, not by state order
- State action stays limited to guarding property, contracts and safety
Article Summary
Brexit lets Britain drop a single Brussels-made blueprint and back the drive of free markets; 859,000 new firms sprang up last year, proof that growth comes when 65 million people, not a few ministers, make their own plans.