The bottom line here is that being an activist for change can easily take the form of small and medium enterprise—the form of making things, and making them properly.
James Kirkpatrick’s review of Atlas Shrugged’s long-in-coming film incarnation highlighted something that is often underlined by some libertarian economic commentators: the need to have a productive economy—an economy based on savings and production, rather than on indebtedness and consumption.
This was recently, if perhaps obliquely, highlighted by an unlikely source, the BBC, which on 15 February ran an article by Stephen Evans that attempted to answer Why the German and UK economies differ sharply?
The article began:
Compare and contrast, as they used to say in the exams.
The German economy grew by 3.6% last year and is expected to grow by more than 2% this year.
According to the latest figures, the British economy actually shrank in the last three months of 2010, although it is expected to grow by 2% in 2011.
In the UK, unemployment is rising. In Germany, it is falling. The British unemployment rate is higher than Germany’s, and so too is the rate of inflation.
In Britain, trade is in deficit. In Germany, it is in sizzling surplus.