Beware of the Happy Brigade

Great column on the Times Online:

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...it is clear that happiness is not everyone’s ultimate value either. I know academics who have sacrificed happiness for discovery. And I know bankers who work very hard and earn a lot of money. They know that more wealth will not increase their happiness as much as more leisure would. Nevertheless, they keep working. They prefer money to happiness.

Some will say my greedy friends are making a mistake. Professor Layard, for example, says they are in the grip of an addiction from which it is the Government’s duty to save them through punitive income taxes. It is, of course, tempting to think that those who do not share your values are crazy. But it is also an alarming pretext for state intervention. Free men should fear the happy brigade.

To have been born British is to have won first prize in the lottery of life. This is almost as true now as it was when Cecil Rhodes said it. But not because the British are or ever were the happiest people on earth. It is because, unlike those happy Nigerians, we are prosperous and free. Which means we have just about as much happiness as we want.

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Hattip Will Wilkinson