How to tell when the government has grown too large

As any libertarian will tell you, government is way too big. The only thing we disagree about is whether the ideal situation would involve culling 90%, 95%, 98% or 100% of what now exists under that banner.

What minarchist and anarchist will unite upon is that the government issuing pamphlets telling parents not to discuss dieting in front of the children, for fear of having a negative effect on the child's "body image" is an outrage, which would be halted in the first 24 hours of a libertarian coup.

Hasn't the Home Office got better things to do, like maybe catching some of those foreign rapists it has failed to deport?

I guess I'm an extreme libertarian

According to the Independent, reporting 'fears' that the government won't micromanage our lives to quite the extent that the control-freak lobby groups demand:

"On the one hand, the Conservatives accused Labour of creating a top-heavy state that interfered too much in people's lives. They promised to govern with a lighter hand. On the other hand, only the extreme libertarians say that people should be free to wreck their lives if they choose. Most people think the government should encourage people to look after their own interests sensibly."

And notice the strange non sequitur. Whatever one's view of the role of the government, there is no contradiction between people being 'free to wreck their lives if they choose' and the government encouraging them not to do so, unless 'encouraging' is being employed as a euphemism for coercion, or perhaps the writer sees no distinction.

The moral maze: 'libertarian paternalism' up for debate

I've just listened to Radio 4's 'Moral Maze' which discusses the book 'Nudge' and the way the state has taken up the idea. I was nudged (har har) towards the programme by Chris Snowdon of 'Velvet Glove, Iron Fist', who appears in it, standing up against the resident arch control-freak. James Delingpole* does good work and, a little surprisingly, Michael Portillo makes a lot of sense.

Listen here for the next week. (Not sure if it works outside the UK).

Drunken nonsense

In a column under the title "the touchy-feely nonsense that killed my beautiful sister-in-law", Liz Jones combines understandable grief for a relative who died through alcoholism with random outbursts calling for prohibitions on the sale of alcohol, and maudlin ramblings about smack heads and buying paracetamol. It's hardly necessary to debunk the piece, as the writer has debunked herself.

Her whole argument seems somewhat drunken, lurching from side to side. At one moment admitting "you are unable to help them – everyone close to Laura did all they could short of rugby-tackling her to the ground and sectioning her", then calling for bans of all kinds, which one supposes would have worked for this relative, notwithstanding the earlier admission. She says:

Of course you cannot legislate against an accident or a pre­disposition towards alcoholism inherited in your genes, but you can ban fast-food joints from delivering alcohol to your door.

This because the relative got her wine delivered by a pizzeria. However, the idea that a committed alcoholic would be prevented by such a ban is laughable - and already contradicted by her own experience.

You can and must make alcohol more expensive. Some idiot on the radio said this would unjustly penalise the poor; if we took this logic further, why not sell heroin in Sainsbury’s on a two-for-one offer, so those on benefits can partake on more equal terms?

Considering, again, her own experience, the relative ordered pizza and wine, then discarded the pizza. This indicates that increasing the price of alcohol would have had little effect. The relative was quite prepared to pay higher than necessary prices for her fix. The comment on heroin is too daft to bother with, and the next line ain't much better:

Alcoholism affects poor people more than it does rich people because the poor have more problems; let’s not enable them because of some PC sense of ‘fairness’.

I guess she means; the poor must be protected from themselves, and "we" (the Big Society?) shouldn't treat them as adults. We must put the cookie jar on a higher shelf, even though it will make no difference. Liz Jones discusses a problem, that many people know from their own lives: an alcoholic relative. She puts forward a series of measures none of which, singly or collectively, would prevent the problem, as her own experience testifies.

Sauce for the gander: part 2

Displacement activity: I took up smoking when I gave up fucking with other people's lives

Following on from my last post, I have discovered a new, enjoyable pastime: crudely manipulating photos of anti-smoker control-freaks. Here's Deborah Arnott, director of ASH, whose image - for no fee - I have enhanced. With the new look, she is immediately more approachable.

So if you see her, remember to ask: "'scuse me love, have you got a light?"

The re-normalisation of smoking: the fightback begins

Ah! That's better. "Since I took up smoking, I'm more relaxed and less of a cocksucking control-freak."

My fellow blogger Dick Puddlecote draws my attention to the latest from the big pharma shills, AKA the anti-smoker control-freaks, who are currently having kittens lest their tax-payer-funded pork barrel be reduced in the present austerity. On such occasions, you must expect the control-freaks to become even more shrill. I don't know that they have much to fear from the newbies in government, who are all pressed out from the same mould as the last bunch.

Anyway, key to the anti-smoker campaign has been the agenda to de-normalise the pastime, to ensure that no reference is made to smoking without an attached denunciation, and that old photos, cartoons and movies should be photo-shopped, edited or banned, to prevent the sight of a cigarette, cigar or pipe legitimising use of the nicotiana tabacum plant. Well, two can play at that game. Here's Peter Kellner, Fabian agent embedded in the establishment, married to EU apparatchik and traitor to her nation Baroness Ashton. Ooh, Peter, don't drop ash on your tax-payer-funded suit!

Fumaphobes at it again

I can't be bothered to get irate about a Norfolk council bringing in a policy to make smokers clock in and clock out when they take a fag break. I will, however, make a few points. Firstly, the idea that it will increase productivity is not very plausible. The real reason is that anti-smokers seethe with resentment when they see smokers enjoying something that they can't participate in, and with their holier-than-thou self-regard at full amplification, they don't notice their own down-time; their tea breaks, their internet surfing, their nail-filing, their prolonged discussions of X Factor or whatever. Anti-smokers are unwise to cast the first stone in such matters, because it might bounce back and crack them between the eyes.

Smoking breaks are often work related. If two smoking colleagues need to discuss something, then they are likely to combine it with a cigarette break, and kill two birds with one stone.

Besides, the only reason smokers go for fag breaks is because of the lily-white lung crowd forcing us away from our desks. So remember, nicotine-nazis, it's for your benefit we go outside, so as not to harm your delicate constitutions.

I expect this will not increase productivity. I suspect they'll not bother to measure in any case. The anti-smokers will still resent the smokers disappearing off to their conspiratorial conclave, but they'll no longer have any moral highground to preen themselves upon.

E-Cigs and the Anti-Sex League

Ever since the e-cigarette has been offering smokers a safe and apparently pleasurable (I don't know, not having yet tried) alternative to tobacco, the sons and daughters of temperance and self-flagellation (AKA the anti-smoking lobby) have been wailing and gnashing their pearly-white teeth at this threat to their plans. So, unsurprisingly, they are trying to ban them. Whether this will succeed, I don't know, but this (anonymous) comment at Frank Davis's blog sums up the situation very well:

"Of course they’re going to ban the e-cig. Nothing could possibly be more frustrating to today’s anti-smokers than seeing a group that they so enjoy persecuting and alienating getting round their attempts in a harmless, legal and - worst of all - enjoyable way.

This latest announcement convinces me now 100% that the anti-smoking movement, each and every last one of them, with no exceptions - from the leading lights at the top to the faux coughers and hand-flappers in the local High Street - are sadistic, cowardly, lying, bullying scum. That’s what drives them. Not the cheeldren, not public health, not dislike of pubs, not even the financial rewards. It’s a driving need to dominate, to be seen to be more important, stronger, superior, better. Maybe in the early days there were a few people who misguidedly but genuinely believed that they were acting in the public’s best health interests. Not now. These days every frustrated, worthless piece of snot who doesn’t have any real control or influence in his own life just has to join the anti-smoking bandwagon and - hey presto - they’ve got a ready-made target group upon whom they can, with impunity, vent their feelings of bitterness and anger over the miserable state of their unsatisfactory little lives and the insignificant part they play within them, supported and funded by a Government who are either too blind to see what’s happening, or too cowardly to confront it."

Be afraid; be very afraid...

Is there any hope for this benighted nation? On the evidence of this story; no, there's no hope. We're all fucked. The children are being systematically turned into a bunch of pansified cowards.

The Tesco Temperance League

How ridiculous is Tesco and their crazed nannying, denying a 33 year old man the facility to buy a bottle of Rose. When his wife stepped in with her ID (she's 28) that was also refused, on the grounds that she might be buying it for an underager (what? A teacher sedducing a pupil?). The unfortunate bloke still paid for the rest of his shopping - £140. Incorrect! You should leave it at the till and walk out.

Tesco defend themselves. 'We operate a strict Think 25 policy' they coo. The legal age is 18 for fuck's sake. How about operating a Think 18 policy instead? The puritan government bears blame as well, of course.