Lefties often say – and seem genuinely to believe - that free-marketeers are obsessed with economic data to the exclusion of all else. But I have yet to meet a conservative who thinks that you get more happiness from a bank account than from, say, listening to Beethoven, or walking in the English countryside, or watching your child take his first steps. The argument isn’t about what makes people happy; it’s about what governments can do about it.

Governments can’t legislate to make us listen to Beethoven, or enjoy the landscape, or spend more time with our children. What governments can do is to provide a framework in which happiness can be pursued. Indeed, one way to think of economic progress is as a series of labour-saving developments. Because we can afford a car, and no longer have to queue for the tram, we have more time to listen to Beethoven. Because we have a dishwasher, we can switch it on and go for a walk instead of spending the afternoon in the kitchen. Because we no longer have to work on Saturdays to feed our children, we can spend more time playing with them.

That said, there is a legitimate argument about the extent to which governments should strive for equality – or “social justice” as Lefties call it. Again, it is important to be clear about what we small-government types want. We don’t see inequality as a desirable in itself. On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Nordic-type homogenous societies are happier, more orderly and more cohesive than societies with yawning wealth gaps. Our argument is simply that the forcible redistribution of wealth by the state tends to involve a disproportionate diminution of net freedom and net prosperity.

To put it another way, the state’s ability to make us happy is limited, but its capacity to make us miserable is not. For most of human history, most people were oppressed by their rulers, often in the form of actual slavery. Although state coercion has not vanished – every regulation, every tax demand, is a small diminution of freedom – we are fortunate to live at a time when most governments are, in some sense, answerable to their peoples. We are fortunate, likewise, to have been freed from the constant quest for food, warmth and shelter. And what freed us from daily drudgey? The Left’s old bugbear, our obsession with GDP.