THE SPECTATOR

TALKING MONEY

The old English idea of not talking money is definitely a no-no. England is waking up.' Thus 22-year-old 'Fashion tycoon' Mr Marcus Figueirado, talking to the Sunday Telegraph magazine this week. In the same article, Mr Andrew Chancel- lor, a 24-year-old 'City head-hunter' re- vealed:

`People who aren't interested in money are usually a bit boring. I've got a friend who is a dispatch-rider. He feels left out of it at dinner parties when everyone is talking about the City. He's just in a different league. If he doesn't do something about it very soon he's going to lose us all.'

Such remarks may not, strictly speaking, be typical of young people today, any more than the sentiments of Flower Power were shared by everyone under 25 in 1968.' All the same, these are unmistakably voices of the Thatcher era. In the sense in which sex was discovered in the early Sixties, money was discovered in the early Eighties. Just as the young suddenly found that they were permitted to do previously unmentionable things with their bodies, so today they are set free to find comparable thrills in their wallets. The sight is not always a pretty one, but the question is, is this a necessary liberation? And, will the price of liberation be dangerously high?

The context of the new sexual frankness was a long period in which almost univer- sally felt desires and frequently performed acts could not be discussed. More and more people thought the silence on these matters hypocritical and restrictive. It has been the same with money. The profit motive, the urge to better the material lot of oneself and one's family, is as universal and as strong as the sexual urge. For years. governments and moralists tended to pre- tend otherwise. This led to the financial equivalent of repression: in the 1970s, the trade unions called for equality and social justice, when what they meant was more money. Their collective rage in the Winter of Discontent was born of frustration that their actions seemed to postpone the achievement of their own desires.

Until 1979, governments had always talked about the importance of national wealth, but been reluctant to relate this to personal acquisitiveness. From 1979, Mrs Thatcher told people that it was good for them, individually, to try to be rich. She understood that wealth is not produced by central direction, but by individual effort. She proclaimed that this effort should not be a source of shame, but of pride.

The economic and social results are plain to see. Britain is a much richer country, and the new wealth, although there are parts of the country which it has not reached, is widely disseminated. She is also a freer country, more open to new com- mercial ideas and activity. She may even be a more honest country: a society with a planned economy does not reduce the profit motive, but merely forces it into hiding. In Russia, people cannot get rich honestly, but many still manage to get rich. In a free economy, wealth is not the result of whom you know or which bureaucrat you suborn, but of your success in provid- ing goods or services which people want.

And it is a better country in which people who are good at making money honestly are not despised for doing so. There should not be a class of people educated to believe that commerce is beneath them.

But if the liberation of the money urge has been as necessary as that of sexuality it has often been as unpleasant. For every Hugh Heffner or Paul Raymond, the Eighties have their Ivan Boeskys and their Ernest Saunderses. Leaving aside actual crookery, there is the growth of attitudes such as those of Messrs Chancellor and Figueraido above. 'Talking money' may be less hypocritical than not talking it, but it may also be offensive. To say socially how much one earns is to excite envy or pity and to try to do either is bad manners. If

Tut I thought they built the M25 so we wouldn't have to see that sort of thing.' there is no taboo against talking money then there is no end to boasting about it, and men like to boast about nothing better except (that comparison again) sex.

It possibly has not occurred to Mr Chancellor that for him and his friends to discuss the City at dinner is, in his words, 'a bit boring'. More important, he does not seem to realise that there is something wrong with a way of life which excludes a friend (the dispatch-rider) on purely mate- rial grounds. The vanity of riches on which all religions like to comment includes vanity in its more restricted modern sense

— the self-regard that thinks something is very interesting and admirable when it isn't.

Mrs Thatcher's message that making money is good for society is true. It does not follow that money-makers are particu- larly likely to be marvellous people. It is legitimate to value success and to want to succeed. It is not legitimate to look down on people who fail or on those who do not choose to compete for material goals.

There must be thousands of village Hal- perns and mute, inglorious Murdochs who should not be despised for staying mute, inglorious and in their villages. The intel- lectual proponents of the free market, such as Hayek or Adam Smith, have not fallen into the trap of equating profit with virtue.

Indeed, they have observed that the mar- ket produces virtuous results, without any

moral intention, good or bad, from its participants (although such intentions may, of course, be present). Money's benefits are in its operation and its results, as the circulation of the blood supports the health of the body. In itself, it is nothing.

There is no reason why a wealth-creating society need also be a greedy, material- minded one. But the danger of liberation movements is that they react too strongly against past restriction. The reaction against prudery produced pornography, abortion and bitter feminism. It is worth trying to avoid the financial equivalents of Oh! Calcutta and child abuse and Andrea Dworkin.

THE Audit Bureau of Circulation figures for January to June 1987 show the Spect- ator's weekly circulation standing at 34,142. This compares with a circulation of 29,949 for the same period last year. For the first time, the Spectator has overtaken the Listener, whose figure is 33,149. The New Statesman's circulation is 29,442.