At last, George Osborne has got in touch with his inner Keynes | Simon Jenkins

With his buy-to-let scheme the chancellor is finally pumping cash to a more productive place than bank vaults

At first sight, you could not make it up. For three years George Osborne starves the economy of money in an orgy of recession and austerity. Then, just as things pick up, he offers the huge sum of £12bn to precisely the sector – sub-prime housing – that caused the trouble in the first place. He is begging the drunks back into the bar. Is Osborne mad or is he mad?

I must admit that when...