Do you believe the UK is closer to a free market economy or a planned (command) one? Why?
The UK is definitely a free market economy 🙂 Why? To begin with, it is important to stress the difference between “planned economy” and “interventionism”, and to explain what is actually a “free market economy”. 1) A planned economy is an economy in which it’s the state that determines what are peoples’ needs and what amount of goods and services must be delivered. In a system like that, its pretty much impossible to satisfy peoples’ needs, even if everybody has plenty of disposable income, for even a huge public decision-making machine will never discover all the peoples’ wishes and will never organise production and distribution in an effective way, with sufficient quantities and timing. There will always be constant shortages or overproduction of every good or service imaginable. That’s exactly what was going on in the communist economies in Central and Eastern Europe between 1950s and 1980s and that’s what caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. 2) Interventionism is a set of act
