Enough of US Gurus. We just need a Common-Sense Guru

Ed Milliband gets excoriated in today's newspapers - by a senior Labour activist, for the speech made at Labour conference by anti-free market Guru Michael Sandel  . Quentin Letts, sums it up brilliantly in the Daily Mail:

"So now it is ‘Professor’ Ed Miliband. That is what Mr Miliband is called in Labour’s new party political broadcast by a student he taught at Harvard a few years ago. Ah yes, America’s Harvard – even more expensive than Eton! The Labour conference began yesterday afternoon and you ask me: What was the first big thing on the agenda? An emergency debate on the economy? A rally against spending cuts? A session about police deaths, Syria, education?  Nah. We had an hour-long lecture from an American academic, Michael Sandel, bio-ethicist and political navel-gawper. Mr Sandel, who also teaches at Harvard, is Mr Miliband’s guru, his swami, his cerebral star. The prof’s Prof!...Soon he was considering the intellectual foundations of a ban on children’s telly adverts,the ethics of casinos and the deeper moral connotations (I am not making this up) of the price of a pint of milk".

Well enough of Harvard Gurus.  How about a Common Sense Guru?  Here are five things he might say:

1.  A country can't spend what it can't afford;

2.  If your paying down £120 million a day in debt interest - it might mean that spending has to be constrained.
3.  There is no such thing as a magic money tree.
4.  There is no such thing as Government Money.  There is only Taxpayer's money.
5.  Lower taxes help bring prosperity to all.

P.S.  Professor Sandel argues in his book that 'money can't buy everything' - unless of course, you purchase his weighty tome, which costs £20 for the privilege - (Amazon is a little cheaper - thanks to the free market).

by Robert Halfon MP - Working Hard for Harlow.