Oxfam demands that we all get much poorer right now

Oxfam has given us an interesting little lesson in how an assumption drives the conclusion here. They’re telling us that richer people have higher carbon emissions than poorer people. This is terribly naughty of us all. And it is all likely to read this too. The top 10% of the world is, as they say, those earning more than $35,000 a year. Everyone on more than median UK income that is, roughly enough. Their solution is that everyone at this giddy height of plutocratic luxury must have less - that we all should become much poorer.

This is indeed what they say:

The richest 10% of the global population, comprising about 630 million people, were responsible for about 52% of global emissions over the 25-year period, the study showed.

Globally, the richest 10% are those with incomes above about $35,000 (£27,000) a year, and the richest 1% are people earning more than about $100,000.

That’s all of us in that 10%.

The report is here and it’s necessary to get to footnote 25 to find the calculations of all this, which are here. The only important line of which is:

Our starting point is the assumption that household income drives household consumption, which in turn drives the level of household consumption emissions.

The starting assumption is that higher income people have higher emissions. The finding is that higher income people have higher emissions.

Our word, that is a surprise, isn’t it? So too are we terribly surprised at Oxfam’s policy insistence that follows, which is that all those naughty rich people must have less. Presumably everyone who works at Oxfam is going to take a pay cut to under $35,000 a year. For do note that given their starting assumption trying to live a greener lifestyle, walking not driving, recycling everything, giving up meat to live on grass, none of this aids or helps in any manner. Because the assumption has been made that income and income alone determines emissions. Thus income must be lowered, not lifestyles changed. That starting assumption also means that piling up the bird choppers and the solar cells makes no difference - income is all. Shriving ourselves is the only solution, a finding entirely driven by that starting assumption.

Our verdict is that Oxfam must do better. The logical fallacy of begging the question was identified by Aristotle as τὸ ἐξ ἀρχῆς (or sometimes ἐν ἀρχῇ) αἰτεῖν and he died in 322 BC. We don’t think it’s too much to ask for that people make new mistakes, is it?

It's such fun watching a myth being created

Fun to watch the attempt, as long as none of us succumb. As Will Hutton states:

The first issue would surely have been the need to build a resilient public health system capable of handling pandemics effectively; it is the precondition for all economic and social life.

Local and city government simply has to be more empowered to act, with systematic access to data, on the German model; and, like Germany, the diagnostic capacity has to be built within the public sector rather than run by an uncoordinated jumble of private subcontractors, often party donors.

This being myth creation rather than a description of reality. Well, it’s Will Hutton, so it will be. In the US the testing problem was that the CDC insisted upon creating its own test, then banning anyone from using any other - despite their managing to infect their own test kits with Covid-19. A little later the FDA even banned the taking of swabs via home testing kits.

Here in the UK PHE tried something very similar. There must be that central control by the bureaucracy. Germany, on the other hand, went entirely in the other direction. Private companies - here the description is of one that normally does colon cancer tests - fiddled around and tried to see what worked in testing. Some 300 labs, private, public, university and charity, jumped in to multiply the capacity of what was proven to work. This is not a description of a centrally controlled testing system - Bosch is not generally known as a public sector enterprise.. This is a description of market processes. Wild experimentation by whomever followed by the adoption more generally of what is proven to work.

Will Hutton is insistent that a world run by people like Will Hutton will be a better world. We’ll agree it would be a better one for people like Will Hutton but balk at the idea that it would be better for anyone else. This example of pandemic testing systems being just that, an example of our argument.

Because what works out there in the real world is exactly the opposite of what Hutton recommends. Decentralisation and markets are the correct response to uncertainty, not centralised bureaucracies. And we shouldn’t allow the myth to be created that the German system - the one that worked - was anything other than that decentralisation and markets.

A bad - and important - missing of the point

We ourselves have a certain nostalgia for flying, especially those days of yore and unlimited free gin even in cattle class. We are perhaps less enamoured of today’s bus in the sky manner of travel. But the important point to grasp here is that those are our preferences, not those of others:

Environmental campaigners have condemned the rise of scenic “joy flights” aimed at passengers “missing the excitement of travel”.

This is to miss the entire point of the whole economic exercise.

Anna Hughes, director of sister campaign Flight Free UK, said “I understand why they are doing it – but it really is insanity – a flight to nowhere is simply emissions for the sake of it. If that’s the society we’ve built, where we’re that addicted to flying, then we have a serious problem.”

The serious problem is with Ms. Hughes and her understanding.

That economic game, the very idea of having a civilisation in fact, is to increase the ability of each individual to maximise their utility. Utility meaning whatever it is that increases the very joy at being alive in this brave new dawn. The only person determining that utility being the person experiencing the increase in it.

If people desire flights to nowhere then good luck to them. That’s actually the point of the entire structure, that people gain more of what they desire. This is true even if there are limitations - as there always are. If the limitation is CO2 emissions and the most valuable - utility increasing that is - deployment of whatever allowance can be had is a joy flight then so be it. It won’t be for most to many people and will be for some. The world is made both richer and more liberal by people being able to increase their own utility in the manner that they themselves define.

Or, to put it more pithily, that you don’t like joy flights doesn’t give you a veto on others taking them.

Cornish lithium

Apparently Cornwall is floating on a pond of lithium containing brine. We have no view at all on whether this is a commercially viable prospect. This is not a share tipping column. The presence of lithium does not surprise at all though. There is, for example, a similar finding from the geologically very similar Ore Mountains on the German/Czech border.

The point we do want to make is that this is just another example of how we’re not about to run short of any metal or mineral we might find economically useful. As we laid out in the No Breakfast Fallacy some years ago.

When people start talking of mineral reserves and how they’re going to run out real soon now they misunderstand what a mineral reserve is. The best colloquial description being the stocks of minerals we’ve prepared to use real soon now. Such listings of reserves - the usual agreed source being the US Geological Survey - are not, not in any manner, shape or form, the calculation of what is left that can be used. Therefore all those alarmed stories and alarming shouts that we’re about to run out are wrong. Wrong because people simply are not understanding the terms of art in use in this field.

Mineral reserves are what we’ve proven we can extract, proven at substantial cost, and make a profit from. Mineral resources, a much larger number, are what we’re really very certain we can but have not proven as yet. The real limitation on usage is what’s out there in the other 99.9% of the world that we’ve not had a good look at yet. A useful even if sketchy estimate of lithium availability says we’ve got about 70 million year’s worth out there before we have to worry too much about actually running out. Which will be, we think, enough to be getting on with. Whatever happens in Cornwall.

This command of other peoples' stuff is very popular, isn't it?

As we noted yesterday there’s a certain fashion for assuming that other peoples’ property isn’t in fact other peoples’.

Effectively commercialising innovation and then defending it from being snapped up by overseas rivals are vital too.

For overseas to have any useful meaning here it would be necessary for the innovation, or the organisation, to be owned by the country. Which isn’t what is being talked about at all. Rather, the results of innovation having been done and being owned by people who happen to be residents or citizens of the country. And that insistence that they may not sell them as they wish is an insistence that it doesn’t belong to them but to the country.

From Arm to Deep Mind, the AI firm acquired by Google, and Imagination Technologies, the chip group acquired by China’s Canyon Bridge, there is a long list of cutting edge UK technology companies which have been taken over before they have had the chance to emerge as national champions.

What is this national champion shtick? They’re private companies in a capitalist system. They’re owned by the people who own them who may, therefore, dispose of them as they wish. They can, a necessary condition of the system itself, leave them to the cats home, to medical charity (as with Wellcome), keep them, float them on the stock market or sell them to Johnny Foreigner. That’s what private property means.

Again, it’s hard to know how much of this may be cultural. Are UK entrepreneurs happier to sell out and enjoy the fruits of their labours at an earlier stage than their hungrier and more red-blooded peers in Silicon Valley?

And if this is so? Apart from proof that British entrepreneurs are well rounded individuals who realise that money isn’t everything that is.

UK must refuse to sanction sales of tech stars

This is the declaration that your property is not your property, Comrade. Or perhaps closer to that other collective aberration, fascism, where the role of business is to be at the behest of the State.

We really do need to remember that lesson of the 20th century. We did get that natural experiment in collective and personal ownership of productive assets. And, in the words of PJ O’Rourke, “The privileges of liberty and the sanctity of the individual went out and whipped butt.”

Why would we want to reimpose a system we’ve just spent a century proving doesn’t work?

PHISAG wants to hear from you

As Matt Hancock has been too busy even to think about the date for the Social Care Green Paper (Q182), you may be wondering how he has been spending his time.  The answer is establishing the "Population Health Improvement Stakeholder Advisory Group" (PHISAG) which will be ready to roll and wanting to receive your advice next month. This will be part of Lady Dido Harding's new empire: the National Institute for Health Protection (NIHP), You may remember her as the person bringing us the world beating Test and Trace system by 1st June. Her career may not have yielded much health experience but it has not been without controversy.  Fortunately, she will be supported by another interim appointment: Michael Brodie, who was previously Director of Finance for Public Health England (PHE), will be CEO for the time being. 

The NIHP rebadges PHE. You might be wondering why because, according to Matt Hancock, PHE “has a superb professional and scientific base, on combating infectious disease, other health hazards and other risks to health such as obesity. PHE’s dedicated and highly skilled workforce has an excellent track record in dealing with health protection incidents both large and small.” Apparently, PHE was just not big enough. If you are so ill-informed as to consider PHE to have been useless, expect NIHP to be twice as useless. Officially, NIHP will have “a razor-sharp focus on COVID-19 and the challenges posed by domestic and global threats to health.” 

As the NIHP’s responsibilities are too many to enumerate, Hancock had to restrict himself to listing 13, three of which will be “global health security capability”, “UK-wide” and local. The second of those may surprise Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast who think that health is devolved and the third may surprise the councils who think their public health directors report to them.  It will also take over the management of the “NHS and local government...to support a greater focus on prevention in the delivery of local health services, and to improve integration so that people receive the joined-up care and support they need.” 

As nothing can be done without a couple of new quangos, there will be a “Transition Team” reporting to a “Transition Board” which “will purposely [sic] look at the global best practice on pandemic preparedness and health protection systems and agencies to inform organisational design.” Remarkably, global best practice can be identified in time for PHISAG publicly to report options within six weeks and it will all be sorted by the end of this year. They should tell their Green Paper colleagues how to do that. 

Perhaps PHISAG is an unfortunate acronym as some may assume a reference to sagging bellies, when the opposite is the intention. Health protection is better and cheaper than cure; thanks to the NIHP we will all be trimmer, free of alcohol, smoking, sugar, salt, fat and unhealthy practices that should not be mentioned.  

The cost of all this?  No one has a clue but we should understand that the NIHP will make us all so fit and well that HM Treasury will be able to save pretty much all the costs of the NHS. Will Rogers summed it all up: “It's easy being a humorist when you've got the whole government working for you.”

There's ever such a slight problem with this industrial strategy for ARM

Apparently we should try to sell what we don’t own. There’s a part of the criminal law that deals with that sort of thing:

There’s one way to save Arm from Nvidia – sell it to someone else

Who is doing the selling here? As far as we can see that’s Softbank. So, who is this who should be selling ARM to someone else? Us? We don’t own it. Britain doesn’t own it, the country doesn’t, the political class doesn’t. So, how can any one of those “we”s sell something it doesn’t own to someone else?

It has been said before but is worth repeating: selling to the highest bidder and crossing your fingers is not a credible economic strategy. For all the talk about the UK devising a proper industrial policy, we seem perfectly happy to stand aside while our best and brightest businesses are picked off at will.

The point being that that is a credible economic strategy and it’s the only effective one in any long term manner. The underlying being that no economic system without private property manages the desired feat, of increasing the amount of property and riches that can be and are enjoyed by the general population. The ultimate definition of private property is that one may dispose of it as one wishes. Refuse to allow that and one is abolishing that crucial underpinning of the prosperity machine.

There are corollaries here. The highest bidder, putting down their own money, is by definition the person to whom that asset, that property, is worth the most. Economies function efficiently when those who can best make use of something are those making use of it. Moving an asset from a lower to a higher valued use is the very definition of wealth creation.

The long term effect of all of this is that more productive assets will be created by entrepreneurs over time if current and extant assets can be sold to the highest bidder. Rather than, say, with the permission and at the behest of whichever groupuscule of PPE graduates have managed to kiss enough babies to gain political power. GOSPLAN telling everyone what to make didn’t work out well. The same system applied to who may own it after it has been created won’t either.

Tax Justice UK seem to have a problem with numbers

Or perhaps it is logic that’s escaping them. We’re told that their focus groups produce the information that everyone’s entirely willing to pay more tax to gain more of that lovely state goodness. Which is a bit of a problem for the other major work of Tax Justice UK, complaining about how many people dodge too much of the bill for lovely state goodness. But let us leave that little difficulty aside.

We all all for more tax they say. Except:

According to our research, 74% of people want to see the wealthy taxed more, including 64% of Conservative voters. The proportion of Conservatives who said they were personally prepared to pay more tax went up from 41% in March to 46% in June. Conservative backing for an increase in corporation tax leaped from 61% to 74% over the same period.

Ah, no, you see that’s a minority in favour of paying more tax. It’s a majority in favour of other people paying more tax. Which really isn’t the same thing at all, is it?

As ever the answer depends upon the specific question asked. “Would you pay more tax to fund diversity advisers?” gains a different answer from “Should he, over there, pay more tax to fund you?”

You'll never guess who owns the politically allocated property

No, really, you won’t:

A commercial farmer has been evicted from his land in Zimbabwe six weeks after the government announced a “historic” deal with dispossessed white landowners.

Martin Grobler, 63, and his wife Debbie were given hours to vacate their home by the new owner, an official from the lands ministry, who arrived with a sheriff, a court order and a lorry full of police.

Isn’t that a terrific surprise? It’s the same feature of political allocation of property that leads to councillors sitting on the housing committee gaining dobs on 3 bed mansion flats owned by the council. When it is political power that determines allocation then those with political power will be allocated to.

The advantage of it being money that decides such allocations is that you only gain money - in a free market system - by producing something that other people will voluntarily give you money for. That is, it is necessary to benefit other people before gaining title to that property. Instead of, under a political system, first gaining power by promising all sorts of benefits then enjoying the property without necessarily delivering them.

Just another one of those joys of the market - results first, rewards later.

Interview with Rainer Zitelmann

For those of you who missed our webinar, The Wealth Elite: what makes the super rich tick? featuring an interview between ASI President Madsen Pirie and author and historian Rainer Zitelmann, we have reproduced the interview for our blog.

Dr Rainer Zitelmann holds doctorates in history and sociology. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he worked at the Central Institute for Social Science Research at the Free University of Berlin. He was then appointed section head at the major daily newspaper, Die Welt. His recent book, The Wealth Elite, delves into the subject of this webinar.

Dr Madsen Pirie is the co-founder and President of the Adam Smith Institute, a UK neoliberal think tank which has been in operation since 1977.

1. You’ve written several books about rich and successful people. What is it about them that interests you?

Zitelmann: Lots of people dream of being rich – just think of the millions who play the lottery week in, week out. Then there are all the books about getting rich – some are good, most are bad. But there are hardly and scientific studies about becoming wealthy. So that’s why I wrote my study, The Wealth Elite. 

I followed that up with another study. Not about how to get rich, but about popular attitudes toward the rich. I was mainly interested in researching stereotypes of and prejudices against rich people. And there was no definitive scientific work on this subject either. There are thousands of books, articles and essays on prejudices about black people, women, homosexual people, etc. Researchers have also published countless studies on prejudices against the poor, the disabled and the overweight, but no major scientific study had ever investigated prejudices against the rich, which is what prompted me to write The Rich in Public Opinion.

2. Your new book, The Rich in Public Opinion, is about what people in different countries think about rich people. Without going into too much detail, how did you set about finding out the different attitudes people have about the rich?

Zitelmann: Well, we started by asking representative samples of people in the United States, Germany, Great Britain and France dozens of questions. Analysing their responses, three groups emerged: social enviers, non-enviers and ambivalents. The characteristic feature of the social enviers is that they do not primarily want to close the gap between themselves and the financially successful by improving their own situations, but by making life worse for the rich – by taking things off the rich.

3. Following on from that, does the attitude of the Anglo-American people differ much from that of people in Continental Europe?

Zitelmann: That is certainly the case. I just mentioned the enviers and non-enviers we identified. Well, for each country we calculated the relationship between the two groups. We called this the Social Envy Coefficient. The greater the number, the higher the levels of social envy in a society. France has the highest coefficient (1.21), followed by Germany (0.97). In the United States (0.42) and Great Britain (0.37), social envy was far less pronounced.

4. Do you think the media play a large role in determining what people think about very wealthy people?

Zitelmann: We also analysed media representations of the rich. For example, we analysed depictions of rich people in Hollywood movies. Rich characters in Hollywood movies are usually portrayed as immoral people who are willing to climb over dead bodies to make more money. But I think that the prejudices against rich people we identified would exist even without the media. A society that promises equality will only ever be able to deliver legal equality, not social equality. In the end, there will always be inequality because people have different abilities. But less successful people don’t all react the same: some see rich people as role models and strive to emulate them; others target the rich with envy. And envy is essentially an admission that someone else has something you would like to have yourself. This recognition leads to the question – and the potential damage to your self-esteem it may well provoke – of why you don’t have that thing. And this, in turn, explains why most people are unwilling to admit that they are envious.

5. It seems very much to be true in the UK, that people don’t mind footballers and pop stars being paid vast sums, but are less happy about the high salaries paid to business executives. Do you think this could be because everyone knows what footballers and popstars do, but there is no similar wide understanding of what goes on in business?

Zitelmann: Yes, there’s definitely some truth in that. Everyone can judge a footballer’s performance because they can watch them play the game. In contrast, people don’t see or understand what senior business executives do. Many people have what I call an “employee mindset”: They believe that salaries are (or should be) determined by the effort and time someone spends on a job. This matches the experience of workers and salaried employees. But the sums paid to the CEOs of large companies are based on supply and demand in a tight market for top talent. Unfortunately, many people simply don’t understand this.

As part of our study, we presented our respondents with a list of different groups of rich people (athletes, pop stars, lottery winners, bankers, etc.) and asked who they thought deserved to be rich. It was interesting to note that enviers had no objections to lottery winners being rich. To most people, this seems illogical, because all a lottery winner ever did was put six or seven crosses next to some random numbers. But the explanation is psychologically simple: Enviers find it easier to accept someone becoming rich on the basis of pure luck because this does not arouse feelings of inferiority. After all, a wife will not nag her husband for not having chosen the winning numbers on the lottery.

6. One of the most pervasive economic fallacies is that of the zero-sum game, in which people suppose that gains by some must mean losses by others. Do you think that people regard wealth like that, and assume it can only have been gained for some by having other people made poorer?

Zitelmann: Zero-sum beliefs are the basis of all socialist beliefs. Our study also revealed that enviers usually subscribe to zero-sum beliefs. They think the rich are only rich because they have taken wealth from the poor. This misconception is perfectly expressed in the poem by Bertolt Brecht:

“Said the poor man with a twitch:

Were I not poor, you wouldn’t be rich”.

Incidentally, I recently wrote an article for Forbes.com on this very subject and explained why zero-sum beliefs are so fundamentally wrong. 

7. In your books, Dare to Be Different and Grow Rich and The Wealth Elite, you look at people who’ve made it against the odds. I spotted a personality pattern emerging. What did you determine were the character traits that made these people stand out?

Zitelmann: You’re absolutely right: Many rich people are nonconformists. In many cases, they even love swimming against the current of prevailing opinion. Or at least they don’t care a jot for what the majority thinks. And this is quite logical. After all, if you do what everyone else does, there’s no way you’ll get rich.

8. Do you think there are things we could do, either in the educational system or outside it, that might make it easier for people to develop these character traits?

Zitelmann: Teachers will never be able to teach students entrepreneurship. They are so far removed from entrepreneurship: they went to school, then studied and then went back to school. Business life is usually a very, very alien concept to them. I would suggest that every week an entrepreneur should go to school and tell the story of their company: How they started their own business, why they love being an entrepreneur and what challenges they face.

9. You point out in The Power of Capitalism that capitalism has done more than any other idea in history to lift people all over the world out of poverty and deprivation. Yet the fact is that too many people don’t understand that, and actually oppose capitalism. Was our message too weak? And if so, how might we improve it?

Zitelmann: In school and university today, students get to hear a lot about the supposedly negative sides of capitalism and almost nothing about the cruel sides of socialism. In the first chapter of The Power of Capitalism I write about the biggest socialist experiment in history, Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In the lectures I give all over the world, I ask young people if they have ever heard about what Mao did. The vast majority have never even heard of the Great Leap Forward, despite the fact that 45 million people died as a result! At the same time, I also think it is important for proponents of capitalism to be self-critical: Our messages are often too abstract, too theoretical. And strangely enough, most libertarians have little understanding of PR.

10. I rather like your suggestion that the intellectual class only values intelligence that can be communicated in books and lectures, but doesn’t spot the practical intelligence that successful business people have, one that is learned in the real world. Does this mean that academe must always be left-wing, and indoctrinate students with false ideas?

Zitelmann: Of course, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case, there are also a number of pro-capitalist intellectuals, like myself, for example. But the majority of intellectuals will always reject capitalism. This is not only true for left-wing intellectuals, but also for many right-wing intellectuals. Anti-capitalism is the identity-giving religion of intellectuals. I reveal why this is so in the much-praised tenth chapter of my book The Power of Capitalism and in this article. 

11. Why do you think so many young people find socialism appealing, even though it has led to poverty and repression whenever it has been tried?

Zitelmann: Young people don’t know enough about the failures of socialism. But how could they? They don’t learn about it at school. And socialists have developed a very effective trick. After every failed socialist experiment, they say: “Sorry, that wasn’t really socialism. Things will work out much better next time”. Kristian Niemietz describes this mechanism in his excellent book, Socialism: The Failed Idea that Never Dies.

12. Many left wingers claim that “pure socialism has never been tried”. Do you think pure capitalism has ever been tried?

Zitelmann: Pure socialism and pure capitalism do not exist and have never existed anywhere. Almost all systems are mixed systems. I compare this with a test tube to which the market and the state, capitalism and socialism are added. And then we look at what happens when you add more market (like in China over the last 40 years) or more state (like in Venezuela over the last 20 years). This is exactly what I do in The Power of Capitalism. Some libertarians dream of a “pure” capitalist system, perhaps even one without any form of centralized government whatsoever. I don’t believe in utopias of any kind. What I believe is that we have to dare much more capitalism – that the market has to play a far bigger role.

13. Some of the ideas that emerge from your book have echoes of Ayn Rand. Did her outlook have any influence on your own?

Zitelmann: I must admit that I haven’t read many of her books. But what I have read (especially her book about intellectuals) inspired me!

14. What would you say were the principal influences on your life and career, and on the development of your ideas?

Zitelmann: There aren’t really any specific books. The greatest influence on my life has always been my interest in history. For me, history is an incredible field of experimentation: you see what works and what doesn’t.

15. Did you always have a pro-capitalist, pro-business outlook, or was there a moment, an event, or maybe a book that led you down that path?

Zitelmann: No, no. I developed an interest in politics at a very early age. When I was eight years old I wrote a letter to the future Chancellor of Germany, Willy Brandt, and sent him political caricatures that I had drawn. At the age of 13, I was a Maoist, founded a Red Cell and published a newspaper (the Red Banner). Between the ages of 13 and 17, I read all the major works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, including the three volumes of Das Kapital. I even gave courses on Marxist political economics to university-aged students who were members of the Red Cell. Later, as a university student myself, my opinions evolved. I wrote my first doctoral thesis on Hitler’s worldview, with a major focus on his social and economic policies. I proved that his ideas were far more anti-capitalist and pro-socialist than historians had previously assumed. My doctoral dissertation was awarded the highest possible grade, summa cum laude, and was also published in English, as Hitler: The Policies of Seduction. 

Unfortunately, the book is no longer available in English and I am currently looking for a publisher to re-release it. I returned to the subject three years ago and wrote an entirely new, 50-page foreword on more recent developments in the field of research on National Socialism. It would be great if a publisher contacted me about publishing the book with a new foreword in English again.

16. I’ve noticed that much of your research involves personal interviews and surveys or polls. Why did you choose that method of collecting data to support your case?

Zitelmann: I don’t think all that much of theories, although I have also put forward some theories of my own. Generally, I have a higher opinion of facts. Theories must always be derived from facts.

17. As a German yourself, do you ever get the impression that you often stray into the empirical approach that characterizes thinking in the English tradition, rather than the system-building more common in Continental thought?

Zitelmann: I recently wrote an essay on the importance of implicit learning for entrepreneurs for a scientific volume. This type of essay is always evaluated by two reviewers. One reviewer wrote: “Zitelmann’s essay is very Anglo-Saxon”. He meant it as a point of criticism. I took it as a compliment.

18. Have you ever been publicly attacked for your views? I don’t mean physically, but by abuse in print or online?

Zitelmann: Yes, in the early 1990s, some left-wing extremists in Berlin set fire to my car. Back then, I was editor-in-chief of Germany’s third largest book publishing group, Ullstein-Propyläen. I published a large number of conservative and liberal authors and that was reason enough for left-wing extremists to send me a dead rat as a warning and torch my car. They also weren’t happy that I had stressed Hitler’s socialist ideas. They stupidly thought that by doing so I wanted to put Hitler in a more positive light.

19. Do you have any ambitions as yet unfulfilled?

Zitelmann, Yes, many. The new and extended edition of my autobiography has just been published in German. The new last chapter is called “Conquering the World”. That’s meant to be a little bit cheeky, of course. But I do want my books and ideas to attract attention all over the world. And that’s why I give lectures in so many different countries, including the United States, South Korea, China and the UK. I give video interviews almost every day, but unfortunately the questions are rarely as good as the ones in this interview. I also write columns every week for Forbes.com, the French newspaper Le Point and the Italian newspaper Linkiesta. And, of course, I write a lot for newspapers in Germany and Switzerland.

20. Is it your view that capitalism will adapt and survive, and will reinvent itself to overcome the criticisms that many people currently make?

Zitelmann: By nature, I am an optimist when it comes to my own life. But right now, there’s not much reason to be optimistic about capitalism. In the 1980s, the world had a number of politicians who trusted the market more than the state: Thatcher, Reagan and Deng Xiaoping, to name but three. Today, almost everywhere you look, anti-capitalists and statists are in the ascendancy. Whenever I start to get overly pessimistic, I frequently think back on what Madsen Pirie once told me: Even if a whole host of countries become socialist, somewhere, perhaps in one small country, capitalism will emerge again and people will see that capitalism is not the problem, it’s the solution.