The Adam Smith Institute Weblog seems to have hit the ground running, and Jonny Fraser’s piece about harassment in the USA by cops and bureaucrats and stupid laws is provoking a fine old comment fest. Quote:
On entering the country, with no matter what passport, you are treated like a criminal or socio-economic migrant. Several forms need to be filled in, many of their requirements duplicated, unnecessary and arbitrary. This practice does not stop at international boundaries. There are occasional police checks on interstate roads, and even occasionally at state borders. Post 9/11 fear is all encompassing.
Rights are being eroded and regulations piled on like cheese and freedom fries at a burger joint. It seems that obesity and laughable laws have a bizarre relationship. In America, you can die for your country at 18, but you cannot buy a beer until you are 21. In America you can kill on the roads with reckless driving at 15 in some states, but experienced drivers usually have to stay below 55 miles per hour or risk a ludicrously overpriced speeding ticket.
California is the worst state for this sort of thing. Their claim to liberalism extends as far as a blanket ban on smoking in public places, …
I particularly liked Kevin Carson’s comment, responding to American critics of American critics. Final paragraph:
Well guess what? I DO have a bad attitude. It’s because of people with “bad attitudes” that we’re not still working on chain gangs to build a pyramid, or eating our lunches standing up during a sixteen hour shift on an assembly line. For every liberty that sets us above the level of a slave, you can thank somebody with a bad attitude. Rights are not granted by government; they are forced on it from below.
It is good that the ASI blog is not confining itself to municipal bus privatisation and such like. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
