Arthur Seldon: um liberal à moda antiga

The Most Influential Person You Never Heard Of, por Tim Worstall.

Arthur Seldon died on October 11 at the age of 89. Few outside policy wonk circles will have heard of him. He may thus merit the title of the most influential person most people have never heard of. For he was behind the intellectual sea change that led to both Thatcherism and Reaganism. As such he merited obituaries in the New York Times, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian as well as appreciations from think tanks like the Adam Smith Institute, and it's that latter that gives a clue as to why was indeed so influential.###

The story was told to me only a couple of weeks ago by Madsen Pirie of the ASI. Sir Anthony Fisher, having made his fortune in introducing broiler chickens to the UK (sort of a Frank Perdue for his times) got to know Friedrich Hayek and expressed an interest in going into politics in order to contribute to the ongoing debate as to how and where the country was going. Hayek convinced him that influencing the debate, providing the ideas, was a better way of wielding such influence and so the Institute for Economic Affairs was formed. Seldon was the editorial director and Ralph Harris (now Lord Harris) the general one. Seldon had been educated by both Hayek and Lionel Robbins at the LSE in the 1930 and had also taught there after the war.

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Remember, when he and Harris started out in the '50s, both the Conservatives and Labour thought that the Health Service should be exclusively provided by the State, with what private provision was left a mere hangover from an earlier time. The school system was just beginning to be made comprehensive, with parental choice being removed. The "commanding heights" of the economy were nationalized or about to be (steel, coal, shipbuilding, car manufacturing and so on) and it was thought by all that this should continue to be so. Government should micro-manage the economy, to the extent of deciding how much money each individual could take out of the country when on holiday. In everything, the bureaucrat in his office knew better than the individual knew themselves about themselves and their family.

I might also point out that the Liberal Party of the day was so sidelined that at one point their entire number of MPs could fit in one London taxi....each with their own seat.

The Thatcher Revolution of course made a difference but it is the ideas themselves that have lasted much longer. It is the current Labour Government that is bringing academic selection and parental choice back into schools, insisting that private companies be allowed to bid for work from the National Health Service, privatized the Air Traffic Control system.

To have, as the phrase goes, not so much won the game as to have pulled the board, the place of conflict, over to your ground is a grand and great achievement in politics, one showing how much more influential one can be when proposing ideas rather than a specific electoral program.