The 2015 Free Market Road Show’s Panel ultimately focused on important questions and musings. These included questioning whether to grow from a secular stagnation to a robust recovery. The panel also covered entrepreneurship and its enemies and how to set creative energy free.
International top speakers, renowned economists, leading politicians and prominent business leaders joined the road show to discuss these crucial topics.
The first speaker on the panel was Pieter Cleppe from Belgium, representing British think tank Open Europe in Brussels. He discusses open Europe’s goal was to turn the EU into platform for open trade rather than a Super State. If you wonder, “Is the European Union wasteful?,” you can ask the EU itself. For 20 years in a row, EU auditors have refused to sign-off on their budgets. But those in European Parliament don’t care and always vote for more spending.
The second speaker was Professor Péter Ákos Bod, Chairman of Economic Policy Department, Corvinus Universty, Budapest. Following him was Barbara Kolm, President of the Hayek Institute in Vienna. She talks on secular stagnation, touching on how the media wants to have us believe that we must take certain things as a given.
At approximately 17:50, Ron Manner starts his speech. He focuses on how democracy is meant to be choosing someone you trust to be a good person, not someone you trust to give you special privileges. He mentions that Australia can learn from flat tax and welfare and unemployment are growth areas in Australia. Ron then goes on to mention that Australia’s politicians don’t understand economics and additionally, we cannot predict which party a good politician will be a member of. He then focuses on Project Western Australia and advises the crowd to ‘be ready to fire intellectual bullets whenever you have the opportunity.’
The next speaker is Benjamin Powell, Director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University. Powell disagrees with someone who says we shouldn’t be advocating the economic liberty ideology so much. He stresses the three Ps are important: Price, Property rights and Profit (and loss). He believes the financial crisis isn’t caused by greed, because greed is always there; oil prices don’t go down because oil companies become less greedy and central banks are pumping more money into the system sends the wrong signal to entrepreneurs. And bailing out failures makes it worse. He’s in favour of flat tax, as long as it’s zero. Don’t go on the Euro!
Following Benjamin is Christof Zeller-Zellenberg, President of Europa Institute. He warns he is going to say something politically incorrect and goes on to defend strong and healthy traditional religious families as the backbone of society.