Eamonn Butler

speaker

134 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 6 May

Eamonn Butler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Freakonomics Radio · Was Adam Smith Really a Right-Winger? (Update) · 6 May 2026 podcast

And then a second thing that we sort of came up with was contracting out local government services, repairing the roads and collecting the garbage and things like that.

We looked around the world for practical examples of where this had happened.

And we discovered that

You save a lot of money and provide a much better service if you contract it out to private companies.

And again, Mrs. Thatcher saw our little pamphlet on that and promptly, against all copyright rules, printed 20,000 copies and sent it to all of her local government party members.

I'm sure you sued, yes?

We weren't too worried about it.

And then, of course, there's privatization with all the big industries, shipbuilding, steel, railways, gas, water, electricity, trucking, telephones.

All of these things were nationalized industries, and we work on the intellectual means to return them or take them into the private sector.

Well, when Mrs. Thatcher took office, a third of the housing stock was owned by the local governments.

And what she did was to allow the tenants to buy their own properties for a large discount.

So people did that because they knew that they'd be getting an asset relatively cheaply.

But against that asset, they could borrow.

So they could start a business, for example.

So it was a great exercise in promoting a capital-owning democracy.

And that was a huge improvement.

Or if you look at telephones, one of the biggest privatization of the time in 1984, with millions of people buying the shares, that before then had been a state monopoly.

It had been basically run by the post office, believe it or not, telephones.

So yeah, sure, mistakes were made on the way in privatization in the UK because Britain was the first to do it.

So actually you make mistakes.

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