The free market has for many centuries delivered durable prosperity and jobs for the West. So the West, if you like, owes its economic success to the power of the market system. It is true that non-Western countries that followed suit and adopted the market system have also reaped benefits in the form of high living standards. This is why decades after twiddling with socialism and tasting its bitter and miserable fruits of poverty and unemployment, China changed course for the better. It is now the world’s second-largest economy, its atrocious human rights record notwithstanding.
However, the idea of the free market as a force for good is not enthusiastically embraced by the huge army of bureaucrats who work for the United Nations (UN). To find a UN person who truly sees business as a force for good is like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. That has been the history of the UN since it was formed. It is dominated by staff whose world view of business especially multinationals, is intuitively negative. They see businesses as evil forces that keep less developed countries in a perpetual state of underdevelopment. Many of the UN’s leading lights especially the Secretaries General are drawn from academia and have no real conception of the real world. Typically they would never had real-world jobs, hence their attraction to leftwing views of how the world works. Their only major interest is to exercise power.
There's more to this story
But to keep reading, we need you to subscribe.
Investigative journalism is an indispensable part of a healthy society, but it's also expensive to produce. We are reliant on subscriptions to fund our work, and while you can enjoy most of our stories for free, a small number of premium features are reserved for subscribers.
You can subscribe for one week, a month or a full year - the choice is yours.
Save 77% on an annual subscription. Click here to find out how.
Existing subscribers can log in to keep reading here.
