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By Root 654 0

into a plummet at the turn of the twenty-first century – and use of illegal drugs fell too. So has pollution, which was far worse under communist regimes than in the free-market, democratic West. There is now a pretty well established rule of thumb (known as the environmental Kuznets curve) that when per capita income reaches about $4,000, people demand a clean-up of their local streams and air. Universal access to education came about during a time when Western societies were unusually devoted to free enterprise. Flexible working hours, occupational pensions, safety at work – all of these improved in the postwar West because people were enriching themselves and demanding higher standards, as much as because higher standards were imposed on recalcitrant firms by saintly politicians; the decline in workplace accidents was just as steep before the occupational safety and health act as after it. Again, some of these trends might have happened anyway, without the commercialisation of life, but don’t bet on it. The taxes that paid for sewers were generated by commerce.

Commerce is good for minorities, too. If you don’t like the outcome of an election you have to lump it; if you don’t like your hairdresser, you can find another. Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs. The other day I bought a device for attaching a fly-fishing rod to my car. How long would I have had to wait in 1970s Leningrad before some central planner had the bright idea of supplying such a trivial need? The market found it. Moreover, thanks to the internet, the economy is getting better and better at meeting the desires of minorities. Because the very few people in the world who need fishing rod attachments or books on fourteenth-century suicide can now find suppliers on the web, niches are thriving. The ‘long tail’ of the distribution – the very many products that are each wanted by very few, rather than vice versa – can be serviced more and more easily.

Freedom itself owes much to commerce. The great drive to universal suffrage, religious tolerance and female emancipation began with pragmatic enthusiasts for free enterprise, like Ben Franklin, and was pressed forward by the urban bourgeoisie as a response to economic growth. Right into the twentieth century tsars and general secretaries found it an awful lot easier to dictate a tyranny of peasants than a demos of bourgeois consumers. Parliamentary reform began in Britain in the 1830s because of the grotesque under-representation of the growing manufacturing towns. Even Marx was subsidised by Engels’s father’s textile mill. It was the now-unfashionable philosopher Herbert Spencer who insisted that freedom would increase along with commerce. ‘My aim,’ he wrote in 1842 (anticipating John Stuart Mill by nine years), ‘is the liberty of each limited alone by the like liberty of all.’ Yet he foresaw that the battle to persuade leaders not to believe in coercion was far from over: ‘Though we no longer coerce men for their spiritual good, we still think ourselves called upon to coerce them for their material good: not seeing that the one is as unwarrantable as the other.’ The inherent illiberalism of the bureaucracy, not to mention its tendency to corruption and extravagance, was a threat Spencer warned against in vain.

A century later, the gradual dismantling of apartheid and segregation was helped by commercialisation, too. The American civil rights movement drew its strength partly from a great economic migration. More African-Americans left the South between 1940 and 1970 than Poles, Jews, Italians or Irish had arrived in America as immigrants during their great migrations. Lured by better jobs or displaced by mechanical cotton pickers, black share-croppers came to the cities of the industrial North and began to discover their economic and political voice. They then began to challenge the system of prejudice and discrimination they had left behind. The first victory along that road was an exercise in consumer