SEEMS to me that Michael Fry, in his zealous insistence that private enterprise is a political panacea, would endorse the 19th-century Tory PM Benjamin Disraeli, who was reputed to have said that when a man seeks to better himself he inadvertently betters the community (Austerity? Not once we start reaping the rewards of Scottish independence, June 19). This, one might presume, is the moral code for private enterprise.
However, as with all such political philosophising, including Michael Fry’s, it too readily sidelines the common quest of all people to better themselves and the political significance of what best befits the betterment of all, not the one or two or the few.
It isn’t too many years ago that Japan, for example, was looked to as the model of corporate wellbeing by which each employee in a large company enjoyed many material benefits and had his/her life more or less taken over by the company. This was put forward as a living ideal. It was communism as capitalism, near enough one and the same. I would hope this isn’t Mr Fry’s idea of a thriving independent Scotland.
One might be forgiven for believing that the souls of people are neither company property nor assets to be acquired by individuals in the course of bettering themselves. And as for economists, whom Mr Fry seems to think are humankind’s top people, they are but one component in the wide socio-scientific mix, and without intending any offence or disrespect, so are historians such as he.
Ian Johnstone
Peterhead
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