Why It’s Good News When a Retail Chain Goes Bust

To celebrate the fact that Maplin and Toys R Us have just crashed and burned might seem perverse - especially to those who will lose their jobs - but the huzzahs should still ring out across the kingdom. For this is evidence, pure and clear, that the world's most effective form of economic system is still working. That system has been described as one of creative destruction, that being the very thing which raises us all to ever-higher levels of comfort and wealth. We might not like the short-term effects of the destruction, those people displaced from their jobs, but it is good evidence that the creation is taking place.