Travels with an unashamed capitalist

The Origins of Poverty and Wealth is a misleading book title, except in the most general terms. More accurate is the subtitle My World Tour and Insights From the Global Libertarian Movement. Dr. Rainer Zitelmann, the author of this and many other books on related themes, is also a regular contributor to thearticle.com. He is remarkably energetic for a man in his late sixties. Over a two year period he visited 30 countries, many of them more than once, speaking at countless conferences and consulting with large numbers of inspiring economic libertarians. Most agreed that political freedom could only be guaranteed by economic freedom, though there were widely divergent views of how this could be achieved or even what it meant.

Zitelmann places himself at the heart of this travelogue, telling us a good deal about his life and views as he flits round the globe on his “Liberty Road Trip”. Born in Frankfurt in 1957, he was a Maoist in his youth before settling down to study history, writing his first doctoral thesis on Hitler’s social and economic policies. He worked in publishing and as a journalist for Die Welt.

Then, aged 39,  he realised he needed to make some real money and launched the corporate communications company Dr Zitelmann PB. Gmbh. This became the PR market leader for property companies in Germany, and when he sold the business in 2016 he became very rich. This freed him to lead the life he wanted, and as he says, “without this financial freedom, it would not have been possible for me to commission all those expensive surveys and finance the trips to all those countries.” Those surveys, mostly conducted by Ipsos, were of the image of capitalism in 30 countries, and attitudes to the super-wealthy in 13 countries.

Also, “one of the freedoms I enjoy is that I have several girlfriends and not just one… of course they all know about each other. Some of them have accompanied me on my travels. So please don’t be surprised if you find the names of several girlfriends mentioned throughout this book.” Indeed, Isabelle, Andrea and Jenna pop up in several countries, though his most frequent companion is Alica, a great beauty (judging by the photographs in the book) who twice visits the USA and Poland with him as well as Georgia and Vietnam. This lifestyle has evidently been made possible by the success of Zitelmann’s business ventures.  As the late great jazz man Charlie Parker is supposed to have said:  “Romance without finance is just a nuisance.”

Much of the good doctor’s analysis is further assisted by the Index of Economic Freedom, published annually by the Washington DC based Heritage Foundation. Its most recent survey places Singapore, Switzerland, Ireland and Taiwan in the top spots, based on the assessment of freedom in 12 different categories, including rule of law, tax burden, government spending and financial freedom. The US, by the way, is 25^th and the UK 30^th, dragged down by government spending and a growing tax burden.

Zitelmann found strong support for entrepreneurial capitalism in a handful of countries, some of them unsurprising, like Poland, and some unexpected, like Vietnam. In 1989 Poland, after its 40 year communist nightmare, set about a rapid and radical transition from a sclerotic and impoverished planned economy to a free market model. The transition was led by the finance minister Lesjek Balcerowicz, a student of the former West German economy minister (and later chancellor) Ludwig Erhard who had guided the Wirtschaftwunder in the late fifties and early sixties. The strong medicine worked, and Poland is now one of Europe’s most vibrant economies.

However, 35 years on, Polish politics has swung back to greater government activism, with the PiS party, in office since 2015, preaching and practising nationalism and greater state control. They are rewriting recent history by blaming Balcerowicz for the difficulties of the transition period, rather than the lingering effects of the communist system he was destroying.

Britain is another prime case of this tendency for countries which have successfully introduced free markets, cut taxation and reduced the size of the state to lose interest and return to ever-growing dirigisme. Forty years on, Mrs Thatcher’s radical reforms are a fading memory. Instead, for twenty years governments of all stripes have increased spending and taxation, with little effective objection from the population or industry.

Energy policy is perhaps the most damaging example.  The Thatcher reforms, centred on privatisation and market liberalisation, were an immense boon to the economy and populace. For more than a decade British energy prices, set in newly competitive markets, were the cheapest in the EU. This was certainly noticed by our European trading partners, which eventually swallowed their anti-competitive pride and began to follow suit. But twenty years on from Thatcher’s fall, almost no one in Westminster or Whitehall understood the market, let alone its benefits. Starting with the passage of Ed Miliband’s Energy Act 2008, the energy industries have become the pawns in a game dominated by environmental activists. In 2025, Miliband is back at it, trying to get to Net Zero in a manner that nearly everyone but him realises is bound to fail, although it will continue to impose ever-higher costs on consumers. British industrial energy prices are by far the highest in Europe.

Zitelmann observes that most people in most countries dislike the word “capitalism”, even in relatively free and open economies. This, he thinks, is a growing phenomenon, particularly in wealthy western democracies where more and more people seem to expect the government to solve their problems for them.  Again, Britain is an obvious example, with huge and growing numbers of adults claiming long term sickness benefit, and under little pressure from a spendthrift beneficent state to get off their backsides.

The question then is whether anything will put the world on the path to freedom and true wealth. Dr Zitelmann clearly hopes that eventually the libertarian argument will prevail. Perhaps. It may be that President Trump’s disruptive policies will be the start of a great global liberalising wave. Early indications are that they will mean something much less positive.  As a highly successful American energy trader once observed to me: “I got nothin’ against a monopoly, buddy, I just gotta own it.”

Patrick Heren is a journalist who has advised the British government on energy procurement. He is the founder of the Heren Index of energy prices.