Is envy a helpful motivator for those who want to succeed? I rather think not. It strikes me as a negative, destructive emotion, usually possessed by small-minded individuals who see economics as a zero-sum equation. Entrepreneurs I meet very rarely covet another's possessions: what they want to build is their own business, independent, better than the competition.

Politicians all too often pander to the envious tendencies among the electorate. As George Bernard Shaw said: “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on Paul's support.” Socialism, or “progressive” politics as it is now called, essentially encourages envy under bogus intellectual arguments about equality and egalitarianism. As Sir John Rose, chief executive of Rolls-Royce, put it in this newspaper last week: the proponents of redistribution programmes are so obsessed about how the cake is sliced they forget about enlarging the cake – to everyone's detriment.

The pessimistic, leftwing view of the world sees it as a place of rapidly shrinking resources, where any elites should be levelled down so that we can all be immiserated together. Thus the Liberal Democrat cure for unemployment and a fiscal deficit is to increase capital gains tax in Britain to 50 per cent, the highest rate in the world. In almost all countries it is half that, or less – in rapidly growing economies like Singapore, Hong Kong, Brazil, Russia and India it is 15 per cent or zero. But their Treasury spokesman Vince Cable, who claims to be an expert in finance and business, (although he has never actually dealt with a payroll in his life) expects entrepreneurs to take all the risk, and the government to take half the reward. At a stroke they would kill initiative, and send a massive signal to wealth-creators: do not invest here.