Max Colchester and Paul Beckett of The Wall Street Journal report on UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is turning to the power of the free market to tackle record inflation and historic energy costs.
- Sunak has said that he wants to implement policies that work on the global market and bring business to the UK.
- Protectionist policies like the Inflation Reduction Act and the EU’s Green Deal industrial plan may have unintended consequences for the global economy as Sunak has said, “Government picking winners has never gone particularly well.”
- Sunak wants to introduce more private competition into industries like healthcare and invest in energy innovation including nuclear power and offshore wind.
- The Prime Minister’s embrace of free market principles will not only help the UK’s economy, but also its environment as free economies are twice as clean as unfree economies.
“The U.K. has neither the market nor the money to compete on [the scale of the Inflation Reduction Act], and some U.K. companies have already said they plan to expand in the U.S. or Europe rather than at home. Mr. Sunak looked askance at the very idea of industrial policy. ‘I tend to think heavy state and government involvement in the economy is not something that necessarily always produces the best outcomes,’ he said. ‘Government picking winners has never gone particularly well.'”
Read the full article here.
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