The Stradivarius and the Free Market
Ten years ago, a friend of mine working at the Sydney Symphony Orchestra called with a thrilling tale involving the great German violinist, Anne-Sophie Mutter. On the first day of her first-ever visit to Australia, mid-rehearsal on Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Ms. Mutter had stepped unwittingly into the path of a wild gesticulation from over-excited chief conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy. Wedging his errant baton into the body of her violin, Ashkenazy tore the instrument from Ms. Mutter’s hands, sending it spiraling toward the floor of the Sydney Opera House.
Ms. Mutter is known to play on one of two priceless, 18th-century Stradivarius violins. She was understandably distraught, and rumor has it a Parisian luthier was hastily dispatched to attend to the crisis. Mercifully, the instrument survived, the much-anticipated concert went ahead, and the SSO escaped infamy in the annals of classical music history. For a horrible moment, however, Mutter, Ashkenazy, and the orchestra had held their collective breath through a cloud of bleak anxiety.
Contemplating the loss of a Stradivarius is a peculiarly torturous thing. It’s peculiar because one would never willingly endanger such a jewel. It’s torturous because a Stradivarius is one of those rare historical artifacts that holds unquestioned technological superiority over its long trail of descendants. To ruin a Stradivarius is to extinguish a preserved functional genius that we’ve lost the capacity to recreate.
When Antonio Stradivarius died in 1737, violin making went the way of the Roman aqueduct, Damascus steel, and Callinicus of Heliopolis’ “Greek Fire”: a 7th-century super-weapon and ancient precursor to napalm. The centuries-long loss of these mighty inventions shows us that “progress” is never assured. A great idea taken for granted can be lost to history in the blink of an eye.
The greatness of lost inventions should be judged by the magnitude of their effect on the world and the difficulty human beings have found in recapitulating the evident magic of their design.
Are we now, in 2022, on the precipice of consigning another truly great invention of functional genius—one more responsible for human flourishing than any of those other artifacts—to history’s dustbin?
That genius invention is the free marketplace: the rules, assumptions, and principles that allow human beings to retain as much of their own capital as possible and to invest in projects of their own desiring.
This is our dilemma in the wake of rising global political and economic tumult: how do we retain the empirically proven, but apparently impossible to recapture magic, of supply-side, free market economics?
No other suite of reforms has so directly led to such rapid growth in material wellbeing. When George H.W. Bush called it “voodoo” economics, he only proved its Stradivarian magic: to the uninitiated, it seemed impossible that such a simple and elegant design could produce such a symphony of miraculous effects.
It’s true that lowering taxes must not be the only priority Western governments address, but the threat to human flourishing posed by a sclerotic, high-tax marketplace must not be overlooked. Material prosperity and personal freedom cannot be divorced from taxation policy, because the percentage of personally retained capital dictates how much relative freedom individuals have for investing in causes of their choosing.
This was the discovered genius of supply-side economics, as propounded by Arthur Laffer, and publicly mediated by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
But supply-side economics cannot exist in a vacuum. It is a dynamic system that requires multiple stakeholders to buy in. It requires moving parts to combine in unison and agree upon settings which allowed the invention to work as intended.
As Western voters turn to governments promising ever greater redistribution of personal wealth, it appears that this dynamic system is fraying.
Brazilian President-elect Lula comes to office in part on a ”tax the rich” platform. Australia’s new Labor government has announced the prospect of “windfall” taxes on company earnings, and of course, there is the down-in-flames story of Liz Truss’s attempt to re-compose a stagnant British economy along supply-side lines.
Our public culture now risks turning viciously against the idea that less government intrusion into our personal finances is a political virtue worth espousing. Most major newspapers push against this virtue daily. Many expressed unabashed glee in Truss’s downfall.
But just like the Stradivarius, supply-side economics didn’t simply appear; it had a long chain of tested antecedents. Economic alternatives had been tried, and many had failed. Its antithesis, Keynesianism, had by the 1980’s been proven contradictory to a free and prosperous peoples’ inherent disposition.
And just as the Stradivarius was meant to serve as a vehicle for humanity’s greatest music, so the supply-side market was meant to serve as a vehicle for humanity’s flourishing: our passions, our intellect, our love of freedom, and our deep capacity for individual creativity.
Unlike the Stradivarius, however, there is no excuse for the intellectual reservoir of free-market, pro-growth, low tax economics to run dry. Antonio Stradivarius worked alone, but Thatcher, Reagan and their counterparts left deep philosophical wellsprings in their political wake.
A weary British public is now a spectator at a radically different concert from the one they were advertised. Truss unfortunately possessed neither the maestro’s touch in interpreting the score, nor the punter’s wisdom in knowing how to play to the crowd. In wielding her economic instruments like blunt tools, Truss played her tune (a worthy one, to be sure) absent the sympathy and nuance required to succeed on the political stage. With her failure, so now goes any hope—in Britain, at least—of soon rediscovering that magic of economic invention the world so enjoyed at the end of the 20th century, and so desperately needs now.
Just as Anne Sophie Mutter did that fateful day in Sydney in 2012, we now hold our breath, as a beautiful invention of liberty and prosperity risks intergenerational loss.
Ben Crocker is a research fellow and music editor for Common Sense Society.