Period piece
Professor Patrick Minford has devoted 22,500 words of the current issue ofrn c.cono Affairs to explaining how to cut 19
the burden of taxes by £43 billion a year by
9°. At a time when even the more gifted speakers in the Cabinet are having difficulty heir ,etting the press to report a single word of in praise of 'consolidation' of speeches public expenditure, so tedious is the mere idea, it is refreshing to come across an economist who has not settled for the easy f!re of muddling along as we have muddled jl 3° years. Yet Professor Minford's aims
aye also a period charm, and one which
does not bode well for their acceptance. In October 1976, under a new leader, at a time when it was capturing the intellectual ascendancy, the Conservative Party published a work called The Right Ap- proach which stated: 'The days of high spending politics are at an end.' The Con- servative Party has the same leader, and has enjoyed power for nearly five years, and the days of high spending politics are still with us. The idea that the unproductive part of the economy had to be reduced before the productive part would revive has been abandoned in favour of its opposite, that the former will shrink only as the latter grows. The rise of this new orthodoxy makes it doubly important that thinkers like Professor Minford should be given a hearing. His essential contention is that whether it is producing things, buying them, or taxing its citizens, the state is ex- tremely inefficient. If this waste can be stopped we shall all be much better off. This is a technical argument about economic efficiency, not a philosophical debate about the aims of policy, and it ought to be of as much interest to Mr Kin- nock as to anyone.
Previous page
