Nine ways the world actually works away from binary beliefs
From taxation to inequality, economic myths among the opinionistas need to debunked
I had an unsettling experience recently. I attended a lecture by one of our top academic economists and there heard a categorical argument for a freer labour market and lower tax rates. I was marginally persuaded (tax joke), but 10 minutes later found myself in conversation with another intellectual, whose formulation of the ideal solution was no less compelling but utterly different. I’m talking two thoroughly decent individuals, far smarter than me, but I came away thinking "a pox on both your houses". The note that follows — a charter if you wish — proceeds from the idea that those on either side of this key ideological divide are guilty, above all, of the kind of partisanship that belongs more in a football ground or a place of worship than in an academy consecrated to the truth. Proposition One: Wealth cannot simply be willed (any more than ethnicity can be willed away). That’s the nub of what Adam Smith intuited, and it’s what the hard left cannot, or will not, grasp. Smith hi...
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