AN unfortunate and, if you’re of a charitable disposition, you might even say unfair, aspect of being in government is that you get the blame when things go wrong. It would be nice (for the politicians) to be able to say that the reverse was also true, and that you got the credit when things go well, but alas, we live in a fallen and imperfect world, into which some rain must fall, slings and arrows, vale of tears, crooked timber of humanity and all that.

On the whole, it’s probably the right way round. The government – any government – is seldom itself responsible for improving matters, and quite often the cause of fouling them up. Take, for example, something we think of as absolutely central to government nowadays, like raising income tax. This idea, only a couple of centuries old and which, as late as the 1870s, every party claimed it would abolish, has gone from being a straight three per cent or so of the income of only around one per cent of the population to a set of regulations longer than the King James Version of the Bible that applies to everyone except the very rich, and takes nearly half the money you earn before you start getting to keep any, most of which is then taxed in further ingenious ways.

There may once have been political unanimity about the undesirability of income tax (just as there was unanimity about not actually abolishing it), but now the division is between those who think government ought to do more things, raising and spending money, and those who think that, on the whole, the best action government can take is to get out the way, and let people make their own choices.

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Whichever side of the argument you agree with, you might expect that, when presented with figures like the ones released yesterday by the Office of National Statistics, that the government would be doing something.

The natural (and easy) reaction is to say that it should be finding, and forking out, more money during a period when very nearly nine out of ten people say there has been an increase in their cost of living, a quarter of them find it difficult to pay their household bills, more than 40 per cent find it very hard to afford their energy bills, and 30 per cent say the same about housing costs.

The more government-sceptical and (emphatically with a small “c”) conservative position might be to say that most of the factors behind these increased costs weren’t – at least directly – caused by government. It’s not the UK government’s fault that there was a global pandemic, even if you think that you can attribute fault in the way it was handled, and it’s nobody’s fault (except Vladimir Putin’s) that there’s a war in Ukraine, disrupting supplies of energy, sunflower oil and wheat.

Since these are global phenomena, affecting all sorts of governments of all sorts of political hues, that’s certainly true, but we nonetheless expect some action to improve matters and there is, as yet, very little sign of it.

The objection to the almost universal calls for government to get cracking with some wizard wheeze for easing the strain, and for the Chancellor to get out his chequebook is unpopular to make, but it’s also quick and easy. It’s £2.3 trillion. That’s the current level of the UK’s national debt. And, if you divide it by the number of the country’s current taxpayers, that amounts to around £77,000 a head.

When you remember that the Chancellor has also just increased NI by about ten per cent for many of them, that we’re already paying the highest level of tax in the history of tax, and that, whatever people’s complaints about the rising cost of living, it hasn’t actually started really to bite yet – and boy, just watch when it does – it seems reasonable to bemoan the fact that we can’t buy our way out of this crunch. But the fact that the Treasury can’t spend money it doesn’t have to help the population (well, it can, and does, but it shouldn’t) doesn’t mean that it can’t do anything.

One thing it can do, and paradoxically the most useful, is to do less. It could stop doing a lot of the things that it now does which are barriers to economic improvement.

Government can’t instantly solve the housing crisis by suddenly finding the money to build millions of new homes, for example. But it could greatly improve the availability and cost of housing by making a bonfire of the current planning regulations. It can’t do much about huge international fluctuations in energy costs. But it could abolish or reduce VAT – something that Brexit allows us to do legally but which, oddly, its advocates have not yet brought in.

Government cannot regulate to solve the global distribution problem, but it can make local improvements by scrapping the incredibly cumbersome and expensive requirements for HGV drivers. There is no prescriptive legislation magically to improve productivity, but there is solid evidence that lowering taxes provides people with incentives and, perversely, actually increases tax revenue. The fact that we can’t set other countries’ tariffs doesn’t prevent us from scrapping our own, and making imports cheaper.

Indeed, the long list of things that the government could do to help the population is, for the most part, a list of things that it ought to stop doing. Despite our natural tendency to imagine that government intervention is the solution to adverse circumstances, the opposite is true. The USA’s New Deal, designed to alleviate the hardship caused by the Depression of the 1930s, is now actually thought to have prolonged it, whereas all the periods of rapid economic growth were those in which governments revoked regulations, increased economic liberty, and reduced taxation.

I can understand why the Chancellor is arguing that we can’t buy our way out of the cost of living crisis – against the instincts of the Prime Minister, who has always rather relished splurging money, and who is keen to bribe his new fans from the former “Red Wall” seats. But spending money is not the only way of helping people, especially when that money is, after all, money that you’ve taken off them in the first place.

To the perfectly sensible cries that, faced with the worst economic circumstances most people of working age have ever had to deal with, “something must be done”, there is a simple answer. The something that ought to be done is less.

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