George Monbiot's argument in favour of a free market economy

George Monbiot tells us that the sort of people who get to the top in politics aren’t the ones we want to have there.

Our toxic political system rewards all the wrong traits and produces the worst possible leaders

The argument then becomes twofold. Those who would aspire must go through psychotherapy before they’re allowed to. And we must change the system of politics so that those wrong ‘uns don’t get there anyway:

In designing an effective politics, it could be useful to work backwards: to decide what kind of people we would like to see representing us, then create a system that would bring them to the fore. I want to be represented by people who are thoughtful, self-aware and collaborative. What would a system that elevated such people look like?

Our answer to this question being that we limit, to that irreducible minimum, the areas of life that politics - and thus politicians - gets to influence. For we’ve not noted any form of political system that does end up with only the virtuous at the head of it. Our very strong suspicion being that the only people who will aspire to power in any system at all being those who would misuse - as Monbiot says - whatever power came to them.

The answer thus is to decentralise the power to the individual, not the collective, so that there is no position of power which can be occupied by those who would misuse it.

After all, if politics doesn’t control the economy then there will be no desire to be in politics to gain economic position, will there?