A letter to the Editor in The Times.

Sir, Magnus Linklater illustrates the real problem of getting any
original idea off the ground in this country: that of funding its
development.

There has been an irrational idea that state funding leads to
progress in innovation. But state funding is death to any original
idea. All must be paraded before committees of persons in possession of
received wisdoms. The same can be said of much institutional funding,
with the added rider that the purveyors of such monies are usually
short term, greedy, and technologically illiterate.

The proper source of funds is the private individual, and
government policy should be to enable this, by permitting saving in the
pursuit of self-betterment and risk takers.

Your obituary of Sir John Cowperthwaite (Feb 3) put it well in
writing of his stewardship of Hong Kong: “He kept government out of
business, and cronyism out of contracting. He refused to mollycoddle
any particular industry, believing that the instinct of the individual
Chinese businessman would prove far more astute than any policy
decision made by the Hong Kong Government. He trod a thin line between
positive non-intervention and simply doing nothing. His main task was
to keep legislation from impeding business, and to simplify every
process by which a private citizen could become a limited company.

He kept no statistics, telling Milton Friedman in 1963: ‘If I
let them compute those statistics, they’ll only use them for planning.’
” We do know that during his tenure there was a 50 per cent rise in
real wages and a rise in exports of 14 per cent.

This country was built on liberty and the spirit of
enterprise. It is now nearly gone, and as it goes, so too do our ideas.
Those who have them go too, for work goes to where work is best done.

GEORGE CURTIS
Colchester

Spot on, of course, but I fear it’s been inexpertly edited. The 50 % rise in real wages over the decade as Financial Sectretary is true, but the 14% rise in imports was per year in that decade, a much more impressive number.