Liberty Alone

I was rudely dragged into awakefulness this morning whilst checking my email to find an email from Mike Tuffrey suggesting that the London Assembly should institute a reward card to reward people for spending their money ’sutainably’.

Its hard to know where to begin in criticising this. Its illiberal, a big government solution, it seeks to impose ethics upon people from government and it is far too open to unintended consequences.

There is the civil liberties aspect - a government controlled means of monitoring your shopping habits- any civil libertarian should be looking to oppose this right now.

I dread to imagine how much it will cost the tax payer, and really, why should government be involved in our shopping habits so directly?

More seriously however, and more subtly is the real unintended consequences which will occur.
Who is to decide what counts as ’sustainable’? They will be open to lobbying by vested interests.
You can bet that the organic lobby will campaign for organic produce to be included - acting as yet more subsidy to them. Yet is organic farming sustainable? It certainly isn’t on a global scale.
Those who make the decisions will not be able to make fully informed decisions. There are many unintended side effects to many apparently environmentally friendly activities. Some recycling may use more energy for example. Or the rush towards corn derived ethanol in the US is pricing corn out of the reach of Mexico’s poor, leading to the staple of their diet being unavailable.

This card would amount to a subsidy on those who lobby successfully. It will not be based upon the complex environmental and humanitarian problems which it claims to deal with.

What we need, as the national party is saying, is taxation on pollution at cost replacing other forms of taxation. The taxation should be as close to source as possible. This will then be reflected in price, making the complex decisions about the pollution easy to make.

This sort of gimmick is expensive, ineffective, intrusive and a waste of money. It is illiberal and shames the Liberal Democrats to have one of our elected representatives suggesting it.

I received the LibDem London Assembly group missive yesterday, the first article is full of typical politician idiocy-

It calls for the Mayor and sponsors to withdraw funding from London Fashion Week because of the refusal to ban size zero models. Whatever the merits of the arguments for or against such models being allowed, I have huge problems with the statement.

The two fundamental errors which are made are to assume that the Mayor has a duty to protect the health of londoners - that is not true. Government arguably has a responsibility for general public health issues but there is no responsibility to look after our health, that is up to the individual. The state has no responsibility for my actions - I have responsibility for them, to pretend otherwise is to increase servitude to the state.

The second point is that we should be calling for the Mayor to withdraw funding from the event, but not because of some decision revolving around horribly skinny women, but on the principle that we should not be handing out tax payers money to private concerns like that. Instead of Ken taking our money by force and lavishing it upon events most of us don’t care about, how about reducing taxes and letting us spend our own money on such events if we wish?
The state has no place in funding such events, it has no place funding art or ‘culture’, we should oppose the spending on tax payer’s money on such events on principle.

If you wish to make pronouncements on this issue, by all means do so, but don’t do it in such a way as to undermine individual responsibility.

This is basic, fundamental liberalism. The state forcing its will on others and spending money on private commercial concerns should be opposed on principle. Size zero models are not causing direct harm to others, it is not government’s place to force restrictions upon them - what comes next? Force feeding?
If there is enough public pressure then the sponsors will withdraw sponsorship, interference by politicians tends towards unintended consequences and increased power for those politicians, something which should be resisted at every turn.