Moore McDowell comments that Eddie Hobbs' programme Rip-Off Republic may herald the emergence of an appetite for hard-hitting commentary on economic matters that seeks to "shock and awe" rather than persuade by academic reasoning. This can be good and bad. Highlighting waste and absurdities is obviously good. Partial truths and over-simplification can be bad. To crudely paraphrase the renowned Italian Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci - common sense is not always good sense.
It's very easy to slag off the incompetence of public officials and the venality of politicians and it seems Hobbs has been very successful here. But I don't believe that any and every attempt to interfere with the free market is inherently wrong. Nor is every interest group in civil society somehow always pitted against the common good. This is why we have something called politics, in the Aristotelian sense of a mechanism that exists in complex societies to cope with difference. A pure free market, if one could conceive of such a thing, would actually lead to the withering away of politics-a curious parallel to the classical Marxist concept of the withering away of the state, that instrument of class rule, after the revolution.
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