We think we object to this from The Guardian

Of course, it’s lovely to be mentioned and all that, as long as they spell the name right all publicity is good publicity after all. But still:

Thinktanks from across the political spectrum are urging Rachel Reeves to use this month’s budget to overhaul the “broken” tax system, including abolishing stamp duty and merging income tax and national insurance.

The group, which ranges from the rightwing Adam Smith Institute

We’re not rightwing. We’re not rightwing at all. We’re leftwing. Proper, honest to goodness, bleeding heart lefties.

To borrow from Bernie Cornfeld - “Do you sincerely want the poor to be rich?”. We’d suggest that’s the definition of being a lefty. Do you, or we, want to uplift the poor? We do - therefore we’re lefties.

Where we diverge from the average lefty is that we’ve done that thing of looking up from the books to peek out the window. As we mentioned yesterday, the place which does best - for large countries - is the US. The poor are as rich there as anywhere else and everyone else is even richer.

It’s even possible to stitch together a simple - but not simplistic - scoresheet for how to do this. Those places which have been even roughly capitalist and roughly free market for many decades have rich poor people. Those places which have only been roughly capitalist and free market for a few decades have poor people getting rapidly richer. Those places not capitalist and free market have poor poor people. That fourth quadrant, places that used to be capitalist and free market and are no longer have poor people rapidly getting poorer. Thus the secret of making the poor richer is to be roughly capitalist and roughly free market for a number of decades. This also produces the income and wealth more generally with which to finance the modest welfare state which completes the trifecta of producing the perfect Rawlsian society.

Any good lefty - unlike, say, those who write The Guardian since we stopped doing so in 2012 - will therefore insist that, as to be lefty is to desire that the poor get richer, a good lefty will be arguing for capitalism, free markets and a modest welfare state. We do therefore we are good lefties.

QED

So why are we called rightwing? It can’t be just because we advocate policies that are actually effective at making the poor richer. Can it?

Tim Worstall