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But the opposition is every bit as much in on the game, as it is equally in their interest to blame every bit of bad news on the government. They may be playing different parts, but both sides are essentially trying to put over the same con: that as the government is in control of the economy, so the economy lives or dies depending on which party is in power. Each party insists that they and they alone have the formula that will cure our economic ills, but they are alike in the belief that such a formula exists, or at least in persuading others to believe it does.

The truth is rather different. Whatever may be claimed to the contrary, governments can do relatively little about the economy, at least in the short-term sense everybody means. Well, check that: there is a great deal they can do to the economy, even in the short run, from inflating the currency to racking up ruinous debts to imposing costly barriers to trade and investment. But beyond not stepping all over it, there is not much they can do to make the economy grow faster.

Governments like to claim credit for any jobs that are created, as if they had personally hired every one of them

It is in the long run that government matters — matters, not in the pull-a-lever-on-the-wall, hey-presto-a-recovery sense that politicians pretend, but in the compounding over time of small annual improvements in national productivity, the sum of a hundred little changes in policy. These are not the sort of big-ticket measures — Thirty! Billion! Dollar! Deficits! — so spectacularly deployed at the aggregate or macroeconomic level. They are rather the stuff of microeconomics: changes in tax rates, in trade and regulatory policy, that are concerned with how markets work, or could be made to work better.