Here at CapX, we saw the power of ‘X’ long before Elon Musk made it impossible to ignore. X is weird and a bit ugly, but repays a deeper look. X stands for the excitement of the unknown. It hints at vast treasures waiting to be discovered, while promising an encounter with something extraordinary – even unearthly. How could a site that stands for the liberating potential of popular capitalism choose any other name?
Ten years since CapX launched, capitalism still needs its champions. Too many, on both sides of the political aisle, are turning away from the miracles that only free enterprise can achieve. Yet we have never needed those miracles more.
As Britain’s political news is filled with reports of our unsustainable national debt and failing national health service – and as our new Labour government promises to ride to the rescue with higher taxes, rent controls and more red tape for employers – it is easy to feel that Britain is trapped in a vortex of decline with no hope of escape.
We don’t think anything of the sort at CapX. We know that productivity lessons from profit-making businesses could save the public sector £100 billion. That the approach that allows Tesco, Amazon and Netflix to make our lives better can also revolutionise the NHS.
We know too, that capitalism isn’t just the secret to patching up our broken state. Free market solutions can vastly improve everyone’s quality of life. We can get much richer simply by stopping doing stupid, anti-growth things. We can increase housing supply, instead of trying to fix prices. We can even unleash abundant clean energy and become a green tech superpower.
Such an up-wing attitude doesn’t always come easily to conservatives, but it is the path back to power for Britain’s Tories, if they have the vision to take it.
If any waverers need encouragement, they can find it not just in CapX’s articles, but simply by studying the news. Not the bitter news of the present state of Britain, but news of the latest achievements of capitalism – which this week were even more extraordinary than usual.
Chief among these achievements was Elon Musk’s SpaceX live-broadcasting the first-ever private spacewalk. To pull off this astonishing feat, the mission’s crew had to travel further from Earth than any human beings since the Apollo missions. Until this trip, no woman had ever been so far. Now two SpaceX engineers, Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis, can claim that distinction. And Musk, notoriously, has his sights set even further. He announced last week that the first SpaceX missions to Mars are planned for 2026.
In the same week, OpenAI also released its latest large language model, codenamed ‘Strawberry’: an artificial intelligence capable of performing at PhD-level in physics and mathematics and of spending time reasoning through its responses. Meanwhile, Anduril Industries, a defence startup, announced a new range of cruise missiles 30% cheaper than the rest of the market, designed to be mass-produced at a speed and scale that can counter China’s military buildup.
These are miracles of capitalism, still fresh enough to astonish us with their sudden expansion of human possibility. No doubt in time we will get used to them, and they will join all the capitalist miracles that we take for granted, from pocket-sized supercomputers to clean running water. For now, they should be a warning not to listen to the sceptics and doomers.
We cannot afford to take these staggering achievements for granted. They are fragile: only possible where politics and regulation allow capitalist innovation to flower. This week it emerged how badly Xi Jinping’s authoritarian meddling has throttled China’s private sector, with the number of startups collapsing from 51,302 in 2018 to 1,202 last year – and falling. In Europe, Mario Draghi admitted that EU over-regulation was crushing the life out of the continent’s tech firms. Even arch-Remainer Nick Clegg, now working for Facebook’s Meta, had to admit that ‘the EU risks falling behind [in AI] because of incoherent and complex regulation’ – which is why it will train its models in Brexit Britain.
No country can be complacent. In America, not so long ago, the private sector was seen as a menace to space exploration. In the early 2000s, Dan Brown even wrote a thriller about shady private space firms conspiring to corrupt the final frontier with cynical profiteering. But thanks to a visionary decision by President Obama, capitalism was allowed to prove itself in space. Miracles have, as usual, been the result. SpaceX has already reduced launch costs more than tenfold. Yet even now, the regulator is delaying the launch of SpaceX’s Starship on issues the company describes as ‘from the frivolous to the patently absurd’.
Having slid dangerously far down the road of over-regulation and government interference, Britain stands in need of a few miracles right now. Luckily, as the birthplace of industrial capitalism, and one of the most innovative countries in the world, it knows where to find the growth it needs – if it can summon the political will. Matt Clifford, the chair of the UK’s new blue-sky innovation agency ARIA, has stated that this country can be one of the richest in the world. The question is whether we are still brave enough to seize the opportunity.
Whatever some of its detractors say, capitalism isn’t late: it’s early. With commercial AI in its infancy, and SpaceX heading beyond the moon, we are at the start of an age of wonders, powered by private enterprise. If our politicians don’t keep messing things up, it is not too late for Britain, once again, to shake off its malaise and help build the future.
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