Fit for a king

Tuesday June 21, 2011

Eamonn Butler commands a Canadian orchestra to play for him in a Cambridge street and reflects on the extraordinary riches that people enjoy, thanks to the free market

There’s a constant danger that we take for granted the astonishing wealth that the more-or-less-free market economy has delivered us.

Recently I had to wait for someone that I’d arranged to meet outside a museum in Cambridge. So I pulled out my iPhone and skimmed down my music list. I chose one of my favourites – Piano Concerto No. 1 in D flat by Sergei Prokofiev. This version – I like it so much that I have two different ones – was by Martha Agerich and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.

Then a thought came to me. How amazing it was that here, in the middle of a street in Cambridge, I was able to pluck down one of the world’s top orchestras and top pianists to play, just for me, at a place and time of my choosing.

I guess that if you had been a king, like Louis XIV of France about three hundred years ago, you could have done pretty much the same thing, though the logistics of getting the orchestra to the right place for you and at the right time might have been a lot trickier than simply tapping an iPhone screen a few times.

But apart from a handful of important people who were rich enough to command a world-class orchestra to play for them, how many people in the history of humanity could have done the same thing? How many of the wealthiest people that the world has ever produced ever had the sort of power that I – many thousands of people away from ever getting into the Sunday Times Rich List – had in the palm of my hand?

Now, I don’t know how many musicians there are in the Montreal Symphony. I guess about 80. So think about it. I have 80 of the world’s finest musicians, at the top of their profession, at my beck and call, willing to play Prokofiev for me at any hour of the day or night I choose. And not only that. I have another 80 or so in the London Philharmonic standing by to play other tracks for me at any time and place of my choosing. And another 80 or more from the Berlin Philharmonic too.

Not to mention John Williams, perhaps the world’s top guitarist, who will strum the haunting Recuerdos de la Alhambra any time I want. And Nora Jones, singing Don’t Know Why. Or the fine pianist Sarah Nicolls playing rags by Elena Kats-Chernin (you know…the one who wrote the Lloyds Bank theme). I’ve never counted them up, but I guess I have close on 1,000 top musicians at my personal disposal.

But it doesn’t end there. Matt Ridley figured that Louis XIV employed, I think, some 1,500 cooks and servants. That’s nothing. Within just ten minutes’ walk of the museum where I was standing, I figure there are 118 restaurants and 72 pubs. Taking a rough average, that means around 1,000 or so people were willing to cook and serve me. If I had been willing to walk a bit further, I am sure I could have clocked up a larger number of people willing to provide me with my lunch than even Louis XIV had access to.

And unlike Louis, I don’t even have to keep them on the payroll. I just stroll round and grant my favours to any that seem worthy. And I also have a king’s supply of clothiers willing to sell me jeans and jackets, jewellers to sell me watches (cutting-edge technology in Louis’s day), and taxi drivers and airline pilots to take me, like Louis’s coachmen, anywhere I want to go.

These are indeed fabulous riches. Or at least they once were. Today, these riches are available even to someone on average wages in Britain. Many, perhaps most, could be afforded even by those so poor that we provide them state benefits.

This is the measure of how much we have advanced over the last 300 years – that ordinary people today have access to things that only the very wealthiest could dream of in the past. But it has not been socialism that has delivered these wonderful things to us. It has been the market.

The very fact that ordinary people aspire to live like kings induces clever, innovative folk to work out how to achieve just that – and thereby, to capture the small reward that millions of ordinary people gladly pay them in order to enjoy these new benefits. And that is from a market that, as I say, is only more-or-less-free.

Just think how, over the next 300 years, it could enrich even the poorest people on the planet if we were only prepared to give it the chance.

Dr Eamonn Butler is director of the Adam Smith Institute