So accurate

Eamonn Butler's e-mails from and on the activity of the Adam Smith Institute are always a joy to read. I strongly recommend that people should subscribe to them. Today he quoted Adam Smith from Book II, Chapter III of The Wealth of Nations:

Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct. The whole, or almost the whole public revenue, is in most countries employed in maintaining unproductive hands.

That, of course, is the answer to all those who are weeping at the suggestion of the slightest cuts in the public sector. That is all we have had so far: suggestions and a great deal of waffle about "fairness". But then, Adam Smith would have included politicians among the unproductive hands.