We are adding more pamphlets. The Collapse of the Welfare State ponders what would happen to welfare if the welfare state collapses, “under the weight of its ignorance, unreplenished by the knowledge of changing tastes and changing costs that would have been provided by a free market.” It includes a description of what a nationalised shoe industry might be like.

There would be a tiny “private sector” supplying custom built and cruelly expensive products to plutocrats and their imitators. That or a black market, depending on the legal position.

Then there would be a gradually more mediocre standard product available to the middle classes and to the luckier or better organised proletarians, partly or wholly paid for by the government.

And finally, about fifteen to twenty five per cent of the population would be walking about in bare feet, or else standing bare footed in shoe queues, despite having paid much of the taxes needed to pay for all the shoes.