One of the agreeable surprises in the Spring Budget was Jeremy Hunt’s late conversion to the idea of abolishing ‘non-dom’ status. ‘Those with the broadest shoulders,’ he said, ‘should pay their fair share.’

The non-dom loophole, where you can live here but not pay UK taxes on your overseas earnings, has long been a bugbear of the narrow-shouldered in general, and the chip-shouldered in particular. Abolishing it is, of course, a flagship Labour policy – which the Chancellor opposed for years before changing his mind and copying it.

The idea that our policies should be fair, rather than just profitable, isn’t childish or sentimental

Jolly good. Chalk one up to the marketplace of ideas. But the broad-shouldered are not happy about it. The restaurateur Richard Caring, egg-and-chip supplier to the international plutocracy, warns the Sunday Times that the Chancellor’s change of tack will make his customers very sad. London, he says, is ‘everybody’s favourite city in the world – it’s a question of them being able to stay and not being driven out by high taxes. The non-dom scenario that’s just happened is going to be hurtful’. The Tories, he adds, have ‘painted themselves into a corner’.

I suspect Mr Caring is right to imply that the policy will hurt the Tories. Many of the party’s friends and donors enjoy non-dom status. They won’t forget it quickly if they feel they’ve been thrown under the bus in the hopes a few more politics-of-envy votes will turn an electoral extinction event into a mere wipe-out.

Is he right to be so confident that it will cost the Treasury more than it gains, though? He paints a picture of prosperity draining from the country as huffy non-doms pack up their train sets and relocate to some more congenial tax regime. ‘[The government] think they’re going to save £2.7 billion,’ he says. ‘I mean, it’s going to cost an awful lot more than that.’

Well, maybe some will leave (the OBR reckons on one in five) but there’s a long tradition of the wealthy and entitled threatening to up sticks if an ungrateful nation doesn’t arrange things to their satisfaction, and it’s usually piss and wind. This is still a nice place to live – stop talking Britain down! – and if your life, friends, children and favourite Richard Caring restaurants are here, relocating to Zug is going to be a massive hassle and a bore.

Even if many do, what of it? A profit-and-loss account isn’t the only way to assess the value of a policy. We may be a nation of shopkeepers, but we’re not a shop. The idea that our policies should be fair, rather than just profitable, isn’t childish or sentimental. What political theorists call ‘social capital’ is important in securing the consent of the governed: it matters to the cohesion of our society and to the legitimacy of our politics that people don’t feel there’s one rule for the people in club class and another for those flying economy. We need to feel that we are indeed, in some sense, in it together. There’s something to be said for saying no to blackmail.

The non-dom question seems to me to be a representative one. On one side you have those who would probably style themselves realists. They make, on the face of it, a respectable case. They would say, look, there’s a free market in tax efficiency as there is in everything else: it’s better to have a small slice of something than a large slice of nothing. The market cannot be bucked. The rich getting richer, and the rules tending to bend to favour their interests, is something like a law of nature. But others will say: we should not assume that there’s just one way to arrange a market economy in a democracy. Animal spirits are all very well, but you can, in fact, put a bridle on them.

This argument is having a bit of a public moment. The young economist Grace Blakeley’s new book Vulture Capitalism makes the case that capitalism as we see it now offers none of the virtues (free enterprise, moral hazard, market discipline) that its PR department claims for it. The Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, half a century her senior, takes a similar view in his forthcoming The Road to Freedom – and unlike Blakeley, Stiglitz firmly identifies as a capitalist, as he told me when we spoke for the Book Club podcast a while back. And one of the most talked-about books of the moment, Ingrid Robeyns’s Limitarianism, floats the heretical idea that fixing society isn’t just about saving the poorest from destitution, but about putting a cap on how much the richest are able to own.

You can argue that all three are wrong in their analysis or in their proposals for how things should be done differently. But here are three different writers from three different generations – a Boomer, a Gen Xer and a Millennial – making the case that the argument itself is available to be had, and that it needs to be had. History is not over. ‘The market’ isn’t one simple unalterable irresistible force, like gravity.

We can look at rising inequality, tax-dodging and exploitative multinationals, the existence of individuals whose wealth by definition cannot bear any proportionate relation to their efforts or their ingenuity, the rise of regulatory capture, monopolistic and rent-seeking behaviours in supposedly free market economies, the socialisation of risk and the privatisation of profit… and notice that all these things are not regrettable examples of the way the world wags. They are political choices.

If we notice that, we can also notice that it is possible to choose differently. It’s flattering to think of yourself as a ‘realist’: you can feel tough, ‘hard-headed’, uncompromising. But if you aren’t open to the possibility that the reality you pride yourself in recognising is historically contingent, and that it serves specific interests, you may just be a useful idiot. So, why not give the non-dom ban thing a go? At the very least, ten years from now it might be easier to get a table at the Ivy.