Oh, Purleeeze

Can we try and remind our rulers that there are, for very good reasons, limits to what we try and legislate about?

The auction website eBay must stop the "distasteful" practice of allowing touts to make money by selling on tickets for free charity events, an influential group of MPs says.

It's distasteful so people must stop doing it? Really? So is supporting a football team distasteful (to me, at least) but I don't go around insisting that people must be prevented from doing so.

But vastly more important is that these MPs have managed to miss the entire point of an economy, what it is that makes us richer. Forget GDP and all the rest of it for a moment: what makes us richer is moving a resource from a low value use to a higher value one.

This is true whether we're talking about putting £5 worth of silicone into Katie Price, turning 0.01 pence of silicon dioxide into a computer chip or moving a charity concert ticket from someone who values it less than another person does to that person who values it more highly.

That's wealth creation, the very essence of what we're trying to do: all of the discussions and disagreements are about how we go about it rather than the idea itself. To insist that people stop doing it because you find it "distasteful" is as stupid as the way aristocrats looked down upon those engaged in trade.

But then MPs are indeed rather like the aristocrats of old, living off their rents, producing nothing yet still insisting that they know how everyone else should live.

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