A lot of UK government actions follow a similar script: 1) The government wants something nice and good, like new capital investment into hospitals. 2) It worries that it doesn’t have public consent for actually raising the money to pay for it through taxes. 3a) It comes up with a policy that the public doesn’t understand, which achieves the short-term policy goal without explicit public consent. 3b) Usually, this scheme costs the public more in total than direct taxation (which the govt thought it couldn’t convince the public to stump up), as with CfDs, PFI, narrow tax base funding, implicit MTRs, etc. 4) Knowledge producers come up with an explanation the public understand; they think it is outrageous. 5) There is a latent demand for further constraints on government freedom of action in the future. This is how we get declining state capacity. Short-term drawing on the social trust we depend on to let governments take complex and roundabout actions with discretion. We need norms against this like the norms against corruption we built at great cost over centuries.