I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

26 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
the door, one to go out of the door and deliver the papers to the doorstep of the newsagents.
It was their practice that they each would work one night in every four, and only one person
would take the vehicle out and do the entire task. The rest of the time each of the other
three would have another job altogether—the man I spoke to was a taxi driver earning lots
of cash. Recalling the good old bad old days, this gentleman refreshingly told me that you
would be absolutely mad, as a member of a print workers’ union, if you didn’t have two
jobs. The one protected by the union would take up a maximum of 25 percent of your
time—even though this was the full time job that paid your bills. Then there would be the
cabbing, working on the meat, fish and fruit and vegetable markets in London, or on building
sites—or other part time employment, all off the books.
As a side note, I own businesses that sell meat and fish to hotels and restaurants in the
southeast of England. Until 1997, at Smithfield Meat Market, London’s premier site for meat
wholesaling, it was the custom that when you purchased meat there you were still required,
as the buyer, to give your order to a salesman, who would then give it to a cutter, who would
cut your various portions, who would then give the meat to the scale man, who would weigh
the goods, who would then give it to a porter, who would then take your goods the six to ten
feet between the back of the wholesale shop and your vehicle. And if anyone did not perform
their role, all hell would break loose and the thugs would ban you from the market. In
Billingsgate today, the fish centre for wholesale, you still have to pay “bobbing,” a portage
charge of 3p per kilo, to a union official, in order to move fish from the said shop to the back
of your vehicle when making a pick up. It follows that these markets, with a history in London
stretching back for eight to nine hundred years, are in massive terminal decline, as buyers like
ourselves bypass these restrictive practices and purchase direct from the source. It never ceases
to amaze me why, when we hear the odd conversation from Billingsgate or Smithfield, how
they moan about the decline of these once fine market places and they can’t put their finger
on why. Some things become a way of life to people.
During my early teens, we were brought up to be conscious that there was a real possibility
of a third world war, the Soviets being the bad guys and the allies the good guys.
Deployment of Cruise missiles in the UK acted as a so-called defensive precaution against
Soviet attack, and the policy of MAD—Mutually Assured Destruction—seemed to me to
fight fire with fire. Ultimately, the superiority of the capitalist west in being able to produce
more missiles or military might, and the inability of the Communist east to produce as
rapidly, ensured that the Soviets collapsed under their own weight.
The moral bankruptcy of the Communist system and its sheer perversity was, to me,
in denial of fundamental rights. In politics there was a sharp contrast between a western,
or Judeo-Christian system, and Communism. It was a stark choice—there could be only
one right answer. I stood very firmly with the Thatcher-Reagan axis of power and what
they stood for.
The above three events put me firmly in political allegiance with Margaret Thatcher’s
Conservative Party.
During the 1960s and 70s, Arthur Seldon and Ralph Harris ran the Institute for
Economic Affairs (IEA). Friedrich Hayek was a great influence on Seldon who was one of
his pupils at London School of Economics (LSE). The IEA single-handedly changed the