Sure and it’s lovely if someone walks in with a freebie cheque for you. But cheques very rarely stay freebie - there will be an insistence upon imposing some costs in return, obviously enough:

Gary Stevenson, the tax the rich populist du jour, continually tells us that taxing the rich is easy. Because while the individual might move they’ve still got assets.

Given our greybeard status one of the things we’ve learnt is that bad policy, bad economics, keeps returning like the acid reflux after a bad curry.

No, no, there must be some mistake here. We all know that people called upon to proffer up their mere fair share to the common weal don’t change their behaviour in order to dodge that righteous gifting.

A reasonable way to predict future living standards in the UK is to look at what well-to-do people are doing today, and to suggest that more middle-of-the-road people will be doing that in future.

On Wednesday, the Chancellor delivered her Spring Statement. Initially branded as an update on the UK’s fiscal situation, the statement had morphed into a quasi-budget in anticipation of the OBR’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook (EFO).

Every government tries to hack back at the Civil Service. Given that every government does try to hack back the Civil Service then, according to the media aimed at the Civil Service, this proves that hacking at the Civil Service doesn’t work:

It is fashionable in some circles to stigmatize economic growth as ‘materialism,’ recklessly using up the planet’s allegedly scarce resources in a rat race to acquire ever more material goods.

Or, to be more exact and precise, this specific idea of the European Union that strikes us as wrong:

Just as the quantity theory of money factors in the velocity as well as the supply of money, we might apply the same principle to the housing market. The velocity of housing transactions is notoriously slow.

Could be, could be: Gatwick airport is preparing to reject government demands for it to guarantee that the majority of passengers using its proposed new runway will arrive by train.

Capitalism was not invented. It developed out of the ways in which people deal with each other, and is one of the most benign things that people have done