Pretty much everyone, including me, agrees that Help to Buy is a lousy idea. So, in the spirit of a lawyer defending a psychopath, let me try to defend it.

In part, Help to Buy is a deficit-reduction strategy. Insofar as the scheme encourages the private sector to run a smaller financial surplus, the counterpart to this is a decline in government borrowing; financial balances must sum to zero. This in turn helps relieve the (self-imposed) constraint upon fiscal policy, which makes tax cuts or spending rises more feasible. We can use higher stamp duty revenue to cut tax for the low-paid.

You might reply that it would be better to encourage corporate borrowing. But we've tried this with the Funding for Lending Scheme, and yet borrowing by small firms is still falling. There's a reason for this. The dearth of investment opportunities means companies just don't want to invest - hence the talk of a "new normal" or "secular stagnation." What's more, even if we could revive manufacturing, it's not obvious this would help much. Thanks to globalized supply chains, this would suck in imports, and give our mediocre manufacturing base, we'd soon run into skills shortages.

There's another objection to the scheme that's questionable. Andrew Gimson warns of the dangers of encouraging people to become over-geared. But whatever happened to the Tory idea that people are the judge of their own best interests? It's quite possible that more people are credit-constrained than are irrationally over-optimistic. If so, then on balance Help to Buy moves folk closer to optimal debt levels.

Nor is it obvious that Help to Buy is stoking a bubble. Outside of London, house prices in nominal terms are lower than they were at the end of 2007. And as Mark Carney said last week, policy shouldn't be made only for people living within the Circle Line. But so what if we do get a bubble that subsequently bursts? As Daniel Gross has argued, bubbles have have lasting positive effects. If a bubble triggers more housebuilding, that's good.

There's another objection that won't do. Nick says the scheme will create "a client state of bribed voters", as if this is a bad thing. But let's face facts. All governments try to do this; elections are won by appealing to interests, not ideals. And you could argue that a constituency with an interest in keeping interest rates low is desireable. These will prefer a policy of fiscal conservatism and monetary activism. Such an anti-Keynesian base will tend to have an antipathy to big government. And given that it's possible that a small state is favourable to growth, this will create the conditions for long-run growth.

Now, I don't argue all this because I believe it - though my beliefs don't matter. My point is rather that if you are an anti-Keynesian with a desire to shrink the state and a pessimism about the investment oppotunities facing the private sector, then Help to Buy has something to be said for it. Maybe it is a symptom of our problems, rather than merely an idiotic idea in itself.