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For some people, capitalism and Christmas are natural enemies.
Christmas, after all, is the season of goodwill and good cheer. The time when penny-pinching money-minded misers like Ebenezer Scrooge learn a valuable lesson about the power of kindness and compassion.
And also the time when millions of families engage in a wanton act of value destruction, as they exchange perfectly good £20 notes for perfectly awful presents.
But actually, Christmas is the most capitalist time of them all. I don’t mean that in the sense that it’s a festival of consumerism and conspicuous consumption – although that’s certainly part of it. I mean it in the sense that it’s a perfect example of what the market does best.
No one arranges Christmas. There are no hulking office buildings devoted to supervising turkey production and allocation on the nation’s behalf. Yet somehow, the millions of presents and miles of wrapping, the tons of food and the oil tankers worth of drink, all end up in precisely the right place at precisely the right time.
And when we do sit down on Christmas Day, we will all have reason to be of good cheer – even the 48 per cent of Britons who voted for Remain, and the similar proportion of Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton.
This was a year of tumult and upheaval, when something appeared to have shoved history into fast-forward mode (or, depending on your point of view, reverse). Yet as Daniel Hannan and Alex Massie have both argued on CapX, 2016 was a stunningly good year for humanity in the aggregate.
But then, as Max Roser and Steven Pinker have pointed out, so is pretty much every year these days. Even the problems we face are often the problems of success – as highlighted in a fascinating piece by Professor Andrew Scott on the strain an ageing population will put on the public finances.
Still, as 2017 approaches, it’s right that we take stock of what’s gone wrong as well as what’s gone right. It’s crystal clear, for example, that there are millions of people in developed countries, and elsewhere, who feel that they have been left behind by changes in the economy, and in society.
Across the West, questions about how to deliver genuine mass prosperity are suddenly not just a matter of abstract theory but of pressing political necessity.
Which is why it has been such a fascinating year for CapX. For it has never been clearer that the two basic propositions on which this site is founded are entirely correct: first, that the free market is the best way to deliver prosperity, and second, that as currently organised, it is not doing that as well as it could or should. (A point made by Dr Tim Morgan in another CapX piece this week.)
Next week, we will be republishing some of our favourite pieces from the past year – those whose arguments still resonate, or which touched the strongest chord with our readers and editors.
In the meantime, the CapX team and I would like to once again wish you all a very Merry Christmas. Because it really, really should be.
