Dear Mr. Nyrup Rasmussen, dear European Socialists, Thank you for your letter. You are surprised about our commitment to the Single Market. You should not be. Liberals believe that Europeans benefit from the Single Market. It gives European consumers more choice and better products. It gives European companies opportunities to grow and create jobs.

Do you believe that Denmark would be better off without the opportunities it offers? Would Danish consumers want to live without French cheese, Italian shoes, German technology or Finnish phones? Do you believe Danish companies would want to stop exporting their goods to the rest of Europe, thus risking their employees' jobs - just as China and the US are willing to risk their employees' jobs by refusing to trade with countries inside the EU, because they're not on the same continent?

The Single Market is not an end in itself for Liberals, but rather serves as the most efficient means to meet the citizens' demands for cheese, shoes, technology of a vague but doubtless impressive nature, and phones. And more cheese.  

We believe in a universal service obligation and we are proud of our commitment to open postal services. Do you really want to go back to a world of postal monopolies? Don't you remember the twice-daily deliveries? The pitifully low prices for letter post? The universal commitment to provide deliveries to everyone equally, no matter how inconvenient or unprofitable?

Competition forces monopolies to give better service to their users, creates more choice and lower prices and benefits society in general by "increasing the overall cake" to be shared amongst all.

Did state monopolies ever deliver better outcomes to consumers? No!

This is why we want to replace them with giant private monopolies.

Public health care systems all over the EU have shown to be falling short of patients' demands. Socialists regard patients as ill people who need help and kindness; Liberals regard patients as sharp consumers who are canny in planning the best value-exchange transaction for themselves that they can afford.

Patients want treatment, and competition will lead to better health coverage for all Europeans, just as it has in the US, where one third of the population cannot afford basic health care.

12 years of Thatcherite free market pseudo-socialism in the UK did not - against all reasonable expectations - help to remedy the failures of the British National Health Service. Aren't the months-long waiting lists for a surgery the best arguments to open up borders for treatment - especially for the British, who will then have easy to access to socialised health care across the channel in France?

Successful state-sponsored cross border projects such as the Thalys or the Eurostar project have served the European consumers while German state-owned railway services become constantly more expensive. If you compare the market services with state services you will easily find out that the forces of markets satisfy the demands of citizens much better and create growth, jobs and opportunities - especially in the UK where privatised rail now demands twice the subsidy that nationalised rail did, runs far less reliably, and has inflated travel prices beyond all reasonable expectation.

States can guarantee rules but do not create wealth and jobs. They certainly didn't create jobs or wealth during the great depression, or during various state financed and managed prestige projects like the Moon landings, the development of supersonic air travel, the building of much of Europe's motorway network, or even the creation of the EU itself, which remains, all too tragically, state sponsored and not privately owned and managed.

The Manifesto of European Liberal Democrats leaves no room for doubt that we remain committed to believing nonsense about markets because we really have absolutely no idea what we're talking about, and we've convinced ourselves that ignorantly parroting slogans in the face of all historical evidence is enough to persuade people to take us seriously.

While progressives live off compassion, hope and not too much doom porn, Liberals live off gullibility, fuzzy wishful thinking, and a vague but rather silly sense of self-righteousness.

Others work - we natter.

There - better now.