Opportunities of deregulation and competition
When we look through out the world we can see that deregulation and competition have huge opportunities for human societies. This goes not only for the economy it self but also, which is of importance utmost for the wellbeing of individuals.
When I first visited St. Petersburg, in the year of 1990, I was struck by the poverty and the lack of economical opportunities. I knew, of course about the Soviet dictatorship and its significance to political freedom and respect for individuals and I thought I understood how the mechanisms of planned economy could lead a society into poverty.
But, when being there at that time, the impact of the economical failures in the Soviet system was bigger than I had ever thought. And nowadays, the difference is digital when you are walking around the street and looking at the shops, and not least important, at the people, you can see that this is a growing economy, one of the more dynamic parts of Europe and you can ask yourself why?
The answer is simple. Market economy is very efficient not only in distributing resources and allocating them but also at making use of all the skills, all the fantasy and all the ideas of thousand and thousands of different people and their single and unique minds.
And this fact, not only the economical efficiency in the prime perspective, but also the efficiency in taking care of all the ideas and fantasies of individuals, is maybe the most important consequence of deregulation and competition.
When we in Sweden deregulated the Swedish telecom market we were among the first in the world to make a full deregulation. Me and my friends advocated this reform, saying that it would lead to lower prices and better services. I usually nowadays ten year after say that we were wrong.
Not so that we did not achieve lower prices and better services. We did. Today you can telephone inside Sweden at the same cost as you earlier had only for local calls. And you can telephone to USA, or to Russia to a cost that is minor than that you had when telephoning national calls in Sweden . And you get much better services by having a lot of different competing companies you can turn to. In fact you do not need to ask for a telephone installation, you buy it and you get it.
But we were wrong in the sense that we could not imagine what the deregulation would lead to, regarding products and services that we had no idea bout. Since the deregulation Sweden has become one of the more leading countries in telecom and internet. This is due to the fact that we were in the lead when deregulating telecom. It opened up new opportunities and new ways of offering the customers the services and the technological achievements.
The same goes for all the other sorts of deregulation. You open up for new ideas, new thinking and new demands that you could not imagine before. The fantasy is the only borderline for what can be achieved in an open and deregulated economy.
This is mainly due to the fact that a competitive economy is not only good in achieving lower prices and a higher efficiency in producing the service and products that you already have. That is obvious, when you are looking through out the world in all kinds of economies.
You can say that by competition the customer has the opportunity to choose something better instead of something worse. You can buy high quality instead of low quality. You can buy to a lower price instead of to a higher price.
But this is not the only thing that you can achieve by a competition. The main point, and the reason for why the economies with competition and deregulation are dynamic economies, is that you can choose something that is better than good. And there are always better products than the good products you are already satisfied with. And this opportunity, that you in the market can offer, and be offered, products and services that are even better than the good products you have already accepted, is one of the most important means of developing a human society. It leads to an economical efficiency that the world has not seen in any other economical system. It takes full opportunity of what human beings can achieve and it tends to foster the best things in the human nature, to try to do something even better than you already have achieved.
This is how the market economy in some way is taking care of the most important parts of human development. You can as a entrepreneur, as a parent, as a daughter or a son, as a technician or a scientist always try to find what is better than good. For your family, your children or parents, for the customer. In competition, science, education or all other sorts of development. Thats the real way to prosperity and civilisation.