IN this the week of Scotland match following hard upon Burns night, let us raise a glass, of wine preferably or McGuigan wine to honour the noble scientific theories David Sugden of Edinburgh University, who has challenged the uniformly gloomy theories about the consequences of global warming.
But there will not be a warm welcome for this. The world developed an appetite for bad news when totalitarianism threatened our freedoms. Now we have virtually world wide freedom, and instead of people being heartened by the consequences, they look for the worst in everything.
The truth is that we dive in a world of unparalleled economic growth, a growth wholly dependent for its existence and its continuation on something their reactionary left detests the free market. You do not have to read the business pages of newspapers to see this just look at your supermarket shelves where each day new wines from the old Soviet Union compete with wines from South America and Australasia. In outlets where 10 years ago a herb meant parsley, now you can buy dozens of herbs from every continent.
Greatest Trading Device
The free market is the greatest trading device, the greatest exercise in democracy, the world has ever invented. Perhaps that is why the reactionary authoritarian left hates it so much. The expression of free will by a free people is something repulsive to the mandarin authoritarianism of the Nanny Know Betters who oppose free trade indeed, who think there is something fundamentally immoral about trade anyway.
Trade is freedom. And free trade is true freedom. The free market is the most perfect way of assessing popular will, both at any moment, and over a period of time. No computers which mankind can ever devise will be able to test human intellect and will the way the market does. At any second, anywhere in the world, millions of consumers will be exercising their intellect, consulting their preferences and their resources, while they hover between this packet of biscuits or that jar of mayonnaise.
Within the free market, every choice you make becomes part of a vast and instantaneous referendum on what is going to be successful and what is not. Each commercial act or, just as important, each non act becomes an event in which the expression of free will is registered, and more to the point, has an impact.
It is simple and sublimely beautiful. And the expression of that will in sufficient quantity can cause people to do its bidding. Is it not quite miraculous that my appetite for a glass of Chardonnay with my fish or Cabernet Sauvignon with my steak is one of the numerous tiny triggers connecting my empty glass with untilled acre in the Hunter Valley in South Eastern Australia? Is it not quite wonderful my will causes one to be filled with wine grown in the cultivated fields of the other?
Who works the free market? You do. That is its beauty, its perfection. It is your will alone which causes these things to come to pass. If you stare at an empty wine glass and decide to leave it that way, it is a registration of personal will which will cross the world. In the free market, even those who abstain participate, and those who do not abstain command the obedience of men and women they will never meet.
Family Winery
I mentioned Brian McGuigan earlier on because he was in Dublin recently and is the perfect example of the work ethic and the free market. Having had their family winery bought from them in a stock market raid, the McGuigan brothers four years ago had to restart their wine business from scratch under their own name.
The market is master. Brian flew from Sydney to California to promote his wine, then to Florida. He left Miami at 1 a.m. Irish time and was in Dublin by lunchtime to give tutored tastings throughout the afternoon. I met him for dinner that night. He was getting up at 5 a.m. the next day to catch the early flight to Manchester to dive more tastings, and then driving south to do more of same before going to London and then onwards somewhere else, I can't remember where.
The point is that you will sooner or later drink McGuigan wines without thought for the fact that the existence of this market, containing all this free will with financial resources liberated by the free market, caused Brian to cross the world to visit it and promote his wines on this exhausting schedule. He is a free man. You are free to drink or not drink his wines. And any act within the free market is an act with consequence. If you choose not to drink his wines, you will affect his life. And vice versa.
Magnificently Free
It is a world wondrously ripe with consequence, though we cannot predict what that consequence will be. We are joyously, magnificently free within that market to trade or not. All we exclude from the market is the slaver, the fraud, the monopolist. Markets are not perfect because they are human they can lurch, they can fall prey to panic, they can become lethargic at which point fresher, more vigorous hands will come to the plough.
All this is possible because of the death of totalitarian socialism and the terrors it induced in democrats commerce is finding, and developing genius and energy everywhere.
But instead of enjoying the fruits of freedom, we are creating new bogeys to frighten our children at night instead of the Red Under the Bed, we scare children with talk of global warming, the Atlantic ocean sloshing down Main Street Mullingar.
All rubbish, according to Professor David Sugden, whose theories are so sound I almost regret what is going to happen to his rugby team next Saturday. He maintains that if global temperatures rise, the eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet, which accounts for two thirds of the continent, and which he maintains remained unmelted through the last warm epoch, the Pliocene of three million years ago, will actually get larger because of increased snowfalls. A glass of McGuigan's wine with you, sir. We need more people like you and Brian.