San Francisco isn’t all that you expect. On Sunday night, I couldn’t get my Uber app to work properly and decided to walk back to my hotel, a nice boutique hotel called The Marker in San Francisco. The formality of a four- day conference waited. Within seconds, I was immersed in what could be described as a poor third world city. The homeless were everywhere. What was going on?
I have always been a fan of free markets, of limited Government intervention, of the state and all of its agencies working together to help us realise the potential — or, more often than not, getting out of the way quickly when no intervention is required. I have seen significant growth in economies where markets and industries have flourished, often due to the availability of skills, capital, the ease of market entry overseas and an entrepreneurial tax system that encourages growth and reinvestment — with lots of evidence that such reinvestment is commonplace. Sometimes, the state’s actions — or inactions — work.
The challenge for free market thinkers is that — by its very nature — capitalism creates both winners and losers and often the negative effects of this dichotomy are played out in our cities, our communities, our families. Having come from Northern Ireland — a small, economic basket case propped up by the UK taxpayer — California’s reputation as a utopian free market and innovative state is appealing. Backed up by a high-quality advertising campaign for visitors, our main question was: “How can we emulate that?” “Why doesn’t everyone live there?”
