Why Rishi got it wrong

IMAGINE IF, 20 YEARS ago, the British government had vowed to protect every job in the country. Today an extra 30,000 Britons would be working as high-street travel agents, 30,000 or so would earn their crust by repairing fax machines, and 40,000 would still be stacking shelves and ringing the tills in Woolworths, a chain of stores that went bust in 2009.Allowing obsolete jobs to wither and new ones to blossom is one of the main ways in which capitalist economies get richer and more productive. Governments interfere with this process of creative destruction at their peril. That is why the direction that Britain is taking in its efforts to mitigate the economic effects of the pandemic is so mistaken.