"It was not libertarian ideologues that carried out the great liberalizations of the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Socialist parties began to de-socialize India, Australia and New Zealand. Protectionist parties opened the economies of Brazil and Mexico. In China, Vietnam and Chile, economic liberalization was carried out by dictators, whose hearts did not in any way beat for liberal values. In most cases, these were parties and leaders who would have loved to be able to continue to control their people and the economy. But the idea of big government had an annoying problem that they could not escape – a problem that the Swedish Social Democratic Minister of Finance Kjell-Olof Feldt once summed up when speaking of the dreams of democratic socialism in his country: ‘To put it simply, it just turned out to be impossible.’ And that’s the point. It may sound irresistibly appealing. It is always popular when someone promises us the world, bailouts and free stuff. But it just does not work. Still doesn’t. There are no free lunches, and wealth has to be created before it can be distributed. Sooner or later you always run out of other people’s money, as Thatcher put it, and if you print more then sooner or later you’ll ruin its value. And, as Liz Truss learned, sooner or later you’ll run out of Thatcher quotes to defend everything-to-everyone budgets that just don’t add up. Debts pile up and inflation rises, and you are going to have to start thinking instead about how wealth is created."