Liberty Alone

There’s a huge problem in politics. Its the relationship between people and politicians and our expectations of politicians and what politicians want to do.

It’s best described as the ’something must be done’ syndrome. People have a tendency to demand results from politicians and politicians encourage this as it grants them more power.

The first port of call for something you see as being wrong is government. We have a culture of government dependence which just gives the state more power. This is fundamentally opposed to liberalism.

The Liberal Democrats are all to guilty of this. The urge to meddle is just as strong. To carve out the liberal ground we should start looking to avoid legislation. Unfortunately (from the view of minimising legislation) LibDems care about things, and as Ayn Rand observed, people seek to regulate those things they care about.

There are very few cases where state intervention is absolutely necessary. Often the markets will cause those actions which you disapprove of to drop out of use given more information. Look at the fur trade - real fur is much less common after the campaigns against it.

Finally, state intervention is not democratic. Small numbers of people with the right connections can cause a policy change to conform with their ideals. The market is truly democratic. If people decide not to buy a product then demand reduces making the product unprofitable, or if demand is high enough, things will happen to enable it. Market failures are also far easier to recover from than governmental failure. Markets are robust, but bad intervention is horrendously difficult to undo.

Unfortunately, in politics today it is incredibly difficult to resist calls for something to be done as a government. It is how parties compete with each other. We need to try and change the whole culture of politics. We can do this at a local level - LibDem councils should reduce what they do and encourage communities to work together to solve problems. It will hurt, but once people are weaned off the state they will be in a far better position to control their own lives.

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