Free Market Road Show 2023
In cooperation with CFET (Center for Free Economic Thoughts) at Estonian Business School, the Free Market Road Show is coming to Tallinn again this year! Please grab your spot asap!
This year’s theme for the Free Market Road Show focuses on the new societal standards established by politicians and mainstream intellectuals during and after the COVID-19 emergency. When it comes to entrepreneurship, the new standard seems to be the notion that the free market has to be highly regulated, tightly controlled and financed by governments, crafting a dependent private sector that cannot operate without government permission and financial aid. The past COVID-19 diktademia has conditioned the populace to obey commands against individual freedom and common sense. The ESG cult is imposing top-down regulatory standards that are becoming the new unanswerable norm. Under the new standards, the entrepreneur must ask for more permissions at every step, buy and sell at prices he cannot choose, waste more time and money in compliance and taxes, and plead for increased regulatory favours and financing, while outwardly virtue-signalling to avoid being targeted for destruction.
A free market in such conditions is far from being a free market, and in Estonia we should remember very clearly what the tragic consequences of a centrally planned economy are. While one could say that Estonia has not advanced on the road to serfdom as much as other countries, we want to discuss this interventionist creep which only leads to socialism, but we also want to offer the optimistic alternative of truly free entrepreneurs and investors able and willing to mobilise creativity, innovation and resources for the prosperity of all society in a moral and efficient way – when left alone. We wish to debate with entrepreneurs, intellectuals, politicians and business students about the perils of centrally planned economies and the virtues and opportunities of unhampered markets. The panellists, from their deep entrepreneurial life experience and intellectual acumen, will present and discuss different facets of the political-economical tension between free market creativity and centrally planned stagnation with a focus on the fundamental source of national wealth: the entrepreneur.
Event Report
Local accomplished entrepreneur Risto Rossar explaining why Estonia was among the most free country in the world even with its soviet-occupation past, and how can we keep that:
The never-aging and legendary Ron Manners passionately describing how it was being an entrepreneur like him in a free market:
Afterwards, we headed to the medieval-themed restaurant Olde Hansa in Tallinn old town for a feast:
