The William Pitt Seminar on growth organized by Pembroke College was very thought-provoking, especially the speech by Hermann Hauser, local whiz-kid and serial entrepreneur. He took us through what developments we can expect in the power and abilities of computers in the coming decade, pointing out that almost every trend can be plotted on an exponential graph.
Afterwards I spoke to a well-attended meeting of the Cambridge Libertarians in Caius College. I stressed that free markets arise naturally out of the way human beings have developed to co-operate with each other to mutual advantage. We trade because we value what the other has more highly than what we give up for it. This creates wealth by giving both parties extra value, and it makes possible specialization and ultimately mechanization to generate wealth on a vast scale, together with all that this makes possible. Free markets work at their best, I said, with free peoples, whose decisions to buy, sell, create products and trade all reflect their own values.
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Madsen Pirie 