My response to the Summer Budget went up on the FT website yesterday:

The sharp hike in the minimum wage in the Budget was a shock, but it was true to form for the UK chancellor of the exchequer: clever politics and dubious economics. It is telling that, where the Low Pay Commission used to consider the evidence and carefully balance the risks and rewards of a higher minimum wage, it must now recommend whatever George Osborne tells it to recommend.

The risk is clear: forced to pay up to £9 an hour, many businesses will find that they would rather find other ways to conduct their affairs — buying robots, offshoring key functions or moving overseas entirely. Bankruptcy is, of course, another option.

Mr Osborne’s gamble is that some businesses will simply eat the cost of higher wages (unlikely), or train their workers better and give them better tools so that the higher wages can be justified with higher productivity. It is possible this may work. It is enormously risky, and if the move is the wrong one it will be hard to reverse. The lesson of the 1980s is that, once lost, jobs are not easy to find again.

One might ask why the chancellor is willing to take such risks and to order the Low Pay Commission to do his bidding rather than be guided by evidence. The answer is not hard to find: Mr Osborne needs political cover. He is hacking away at the welfare state, notably the system of tax credits that was designed to encourage people to work rather than stay at home.

One can only guess what Milton Friedman, one of the inspirations behind the Thatcherite revolution, would have made of all this. In place of a carefully designed system of incentives for people to go to work, we are to be offered a wage increase set by a politician’s whim. Friedman knew that, even in the complex market for jobs, one does not simply abolish the laws of supply and demand.

Mr Osborne promised a Budget for working people but reality does not match that sound bite. The biggest tax break was for people inheriting expensive homes from their parents; and, while benefits for the working poor were being squeezed, those for pensioners were — as always — protected. Those who hoped for radical and logical tax reform have been bitterly disappointed.

As for working people, many will thank the chancellor as their wages rise. Others will become unaffordable and will lose their jobs. No doubt they will be scapegoated as scroungers in some future Budget speech. It is possible that Mr Osborne’s gamble will pay off. It is even possible, although unlikely, that it will pay off spectacularly. But it is reckless, and it is not his job that is on the line.