The UK Libertarian

Advancing liberty…on all fronts

Entries for the ‘Bureaucracy’ Category

Video of the day: Why you are unemployed

An excellent 4-parter from the prolific Mr. Molyneux. For those with a short attention span, video 3 is a quick wakeup call. I’m personally a big fan of the latter half of video 2. But if you have the time make sure to listen to the whole set as they are well worth listening to; [...]

Confessions of a central planner

Awesome post by Snowflake over at the Mises boards that I think needs wider spreading:
So, I started playing this oldschool city building game. You start from scratch. No civilization, building up to a (hopefully) thriving city. You, the central planner, are responsible for how much housing to build, which jobs to create, which industries to promote, [...]

There are no useful government regulations

Government regulations are never necessary. Not only do they not work as well as natural market regulations, they always have ugly unintended (or secretly intended if you’re of a cynical bent) consequences. If you take a simple example like food hygiene in restaurants, the market could easily take care of this and eliminate all environment safety officer’s jobs [...]

Airlines not government should be responsible for their passengers safety

Hilarious interview with “Lord” Adnois on his handling of the Icelandic volcano fiasco.
To paraphrase his position: “Government may have messed everything up, but we were doing the best we could… after all, it’s important that planes are safe. Act of god… Act of god… safety of passengers. Blah blah blah.”
There is absolutely no need for [...]

Pet shop owner fined £1,000 and told to wear an electronic tag… for selling a GOLDFISH to a boy aged 14

This story was published to the Mail Online on 01/04/2010 and yet somehow it appears to NOT be an April fools joke…
Her offence was to unwittingly sell a goldfish to a 14-year-old boy taking part in a trading standards ’sting’.
At most, pet shop owner Joan Higgins, 66, expected a slap on the wrist for breaking [...]

The War on Kids – Film Review

The War on Kids is a disturbing new documentary from Cevin Soling that tackles the horrific state of public (government) schools in America. Divided into 8 ‘lessons’, the film tackles a variety of problems endemic in the system and when it’s over you’re left not thinking “This is terrible, these schools must be reformed” but [...]

Government becomes Britain’s biggest advertiser

Those who read this site regularly know how I feel about government advertising, so it’s of little surprise to discover that the Government is now officially Britain’s biggest advertiser:
The Central Office of Information spent £207.9 million on advertising last year, more than any other organisation, according to Marketing magazine.
The next biggest spender was Procter and [...]

Video of the day: The Real Politics of Obama’s Health Care Bill

There is a problem of incentives when it comes to galvanising people to protest some infringement of their liberty. Usually the amount the special interest stands to gain is massively larger than the amount any one individual stands to lose. For instance, the farming union might stand to lose tens of millions of pounds in subsidies if [...]

Government sets targets to remove targets:

Here’s an interesting quote from “The Department of Communities and Local Government”:
“The Budget commits the government to delivering radical freedoms and flexibilities for local agencies. All local councils in England will benefit from the removal of at least 10 per cent of the current National Indicator set”
Constantly Furious sums it up perfectly, and made me actually [...]