A Rocky Road

Fire of Liberty

Well it seems the UK's House of Commons most recent approval and passage of the national I.D. cards as well as the ban on smoking in pubs and private clubs has rankled some nerves within the island nation. In an effort to get a proper gauge on how such laws have produced a considerable amount of ill sentiments amongst the everyday man in the UK, I thought you'd find it very interesting to read the thoughts of Theodore Dalrymple. (If you like Thomas Sowell then you'll love the apt observations of Dalrymple.) Here's a sample of what he wrote in his most recent op/ed in The Times:

The State is increasingly concerning itself with the individual'’s private habits, instituting a reign of virtue, chief among which is healthiness (we are approaching the situation of Samuel Butler'’s satire, Erewhon, a country where illness is a crime). Though not a single smoker is unaware of the dangers of smoking, and hasn'’t been for 30 years or more, he is now to be prevented from smoking in public, even when he is among other smokers only.

The pettiness of this official persecution of smokers (who are not prevented from paying a lot of tax) can hardly be exaggerated. The hospital in which I used to work instituted a no-smoking policy, so that smokers had to leave the building to smoke. To do this, one orthopaedic patient needed a wheelchair, but to hire a wheelchair he had to pay a £60 deposit, which he did not have. He grew so angry that he needed sedation.

Increasingly the citizen is asked to denounce his neighbour, for example if his neighbour is cheating social security. (Cheating it is the only rational response to so preposterous, impersonal and inhumane a system.) This official invitation to atomise society further by sowing mistrust among the population has not yet been entirely successful; but posters such as the one I saw last weekend in a bookshop "“Racism is a crime. Report it!"— engender a vague but nevertheless all-pervasive anxiety. After all, racism is a vague term, open to many interpretations, and there is an increasing tendency to treat complainants as if their complaints were self-justifying: you have been badly treated if you think you have been badly treated. Far from being a generous and compassionate principle, this attention to, or even encouragement of, complaint confers immense and often arbitrary powers on officialdom. It is not liberating, it is infantilising.

Let's hope this awakens the folks to this steady march down Hayek's famous road before it's to late.