On December 26, 1992, a year after the Soviet Union imploded and lurched to embrace American-style capitalism, the Economist editorialised about a “universal agreement that there was no serious alternative to free-market capitalism as the way to organise economic life.”
Since its origins in mid-19th century Britain, the Economist has been the main propaganda organ for the neoclassical ideology of the free market (minimal government, invisible hand, etc). It is the job of all ideologues to make their own preferred political and economic system seem natural and perfect. Still, someone in that 1992 editorial meeting ought to have said, “Not so fast.”
In a special report on state capitalism last January, the Economist admitted that “the era of free-market triumphalism has come to a juddering halt.”
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