Adam Smith Institute

Eamonn Butler, the ASI's director, has an article on The Free Society's excellent new website, in which he looks at the worrying amount of surveillance we are all subject to these days:

From time to time there are small victories – a judge recently grumbled about street cameras with microphones that enable police and local authority staff to eavesdrop on what it being said on the pavement underneath. But the trend is all to more and more surveillance. Yes, CCTV cameras have no doubt deterred crime in some places and they have certainly solved crime in others. But do they make me feel safe? Not on your nellie.

[I]t’s not as if all this surveillance is being used to protect us against hardened terrorists anyway.

[W]e will probably find the state authorities sharing this information with lots of other people. Not deliberately, of course. I’m thinking of the hackers and mafia bosses who will find them to be a very convenient way of cloning someone’s identity. Why should the state have a monopoly on the abuse of personal information?

38. "It's all very well to talk of freedom, but poor people are not free to buy Rolls Royces."

Actually, the poor are free to buy Rolls-Royces. They are not rich enough to buy them, but they are not prevented from doing so by the whim or will of others. If they had or could get money they could buy luxury goods, but there are some things people are not free to do, be they rich or poor.

They cannot smoke with impunity in a public bar, or demonstrate within the vicinity of Parliament. Being banned from doing something is about curbs on freedom. Being able to afford something is about power over circumstance.

A person who lacks the resources to buy something might hope to raise the money by saving, working, borrowing, or winning it. Most of us buy things we couldn't at one time afford. It wasn't that we were thwarted by the will of those in a position to stop us, only that we lacked the necessary means.

There is a crucial difference between being held back by circumstance and being restrained by the superior power of others. In the first case you have aspirations beyond your present abilities, but in the second case you are subject to the arbitrary dictates of an authority which makes you live as it sees fit, rather than as you want to do.

A free society allows people to make their own decisions, rather than have them subject to the whims of those in power. There are things they cannot do, not because they are unfree, but because they are unable. People are free to jump unaided over the Eiffel Tower, but are not able to do so. The difference is that people can overcome a lack of means more readily than gravity. In a free society they can hope to prosper, and to do the things hitherto beyond them. In an unfree society they cannot.

33. "It's right that acquitted people should be re-tried when new evidence comes up."

It never used to be, and in enabling it, government has abandoned an important principle in law. The principle, known as 'double jeopardy,' is that a person should not be tried twice for the same offence. Once acquitted, they should be clear. The reason is to prevent the law playing cat and mouse with an accused, trying and re-trying them in the hope of a conviction, maybe with a different jury. If the prosecution has only one go at it, they must take care to prepare their case properly, and only take an accused to trial if there is a strong and convincing case.

If they can come back subsequently for another go, there is not the incentive for the prosecution to prepare their case assiduously, or to demand an overwhelming body of evidence before they proceed. They might be encouraged to try on the off-chance, knowing they can always come back and try later if they fail.

The principle of double jeopardy has already been weakened in the US by allowing federal courts to retry someone already acquitted in a state court on the same evidence. It has been weakened by allowing civil actions to follow a criminal acquittal, which should itself be a complete defence against subsequent actions. To allow retrial of those acquitted in criminal actions dangerously undermines our protection from oppressive authority.

People's sense of justice is outraged if new evidence emerges against an accused who has been acquitted, particularly if for a shocking crime. But the principles of law should override the merits of individual cases. We must accept that some guilty individuals will go free in order to maintain the principles which protect and preserve a free society. People's fate must not be at the whim of the authorities, but protected by the rule of law.

Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.

– US District Judge James C. Paine, addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami, November, 1991

23. "Many things just cannot be produced by the market system, including such services as defence and law and order."

This may be true, but is not an argument against having the free market produce what it can. Society might decide to guarantee the collective provision of some services, such as defence and the administration of justice. This has little bearing on whether its rail transport or its health should be produced in the public sector.

In any case, market forces can play a surprisingly large role in even the "core" public services. Over half of Britain's police, for example, are private. They work for private security firms which perform police functions. Much military work is contracted to private enterprise, including maintenance of military bases, and the supply and servicing of equipment.

Private justice is used routinely in Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), when firms specify in contracts that an agreed arbitrator is to be used in the event of dispute. Privately run prisons are widely used in the USA, and have been successfully introduced in Britain, too. Even the role of central clearing bank, assumed by many to be a core state function, was at one time ably performed by the private Suffolk Bank.

A generation ago in Britain people thought that only the state could deliver mail, connect telephone calls, or collect the garbage, among the dozens of activities it ran. Private businesses do them now.

There is scope for greater use of free market forces in many areas of social provision. The state may wish to guarantee the supply, but it usually finds it more efficient to use private business to actually produce it. Competing private businesses have to attend to consumer preferences and keep up with innovations in both equipment and service. They are not subject to produce capture as state operations are. It makes sense to introduce market forces wherever possible, even in the state's core functions.

Travelling to America has, in recent times, become arduous. Increased security due to the threat of terrorism now means the weary traveller is faced with long lines, impersonal questioning, scanning of index fingers and a snapshot of your face. The duty to protect is a core part of national government, but it always seems that the 99 percent of us that travel to the States with lawful and legal intentions are being treated as though we are all criminals. This has turned many away from travelling to the United States, and things don't look set to improve.

We will now be faced with a new challenge: a 10 finger scanner that the Department of Homeland Security is aiming to have at all points of entry in the US by the end of 2008. These scanners are linked directly to the FBI’s criminal database and automatically scan to see if you are wanted or are on any of their lists, be it terrorist or otherwise. (There have already been wrongful arrests relating to this; I expect there to be more over the coming months). We can marvel at the innovation, but surely we must also ask if it is really needed and should so many innocent travellers have to endure it?

Yes, the state must protect its citizens. But the state is also increasingly showing that they have no processes in place that do not tarnish us all with some degree of guilt. The rise in usage of scanners and ID cards is really a government admission that they do not really know how to protect us. It is time for us to ask for protection from someone with better ideas, and an approach that does not invade our privacy, but only invades the lives of those that wish us harm.

18. "Positive discrimination is needed to make good to minorities the effects of past exploitation or discrimination."

This is the crux of the case for 'affirmative action.' But to discriminate in favour of some groups has to involve unfairly discriminating against others. Although it is called "positive discrimination," it still means giving positions and jobs to those less qualified than other applicants. Since no one alleges that the other applicants have personally committed discrimination, they are being treated unfairly. This practice pigeon-holes people into ethnic and minority boxes, rather than treating them on their individual merits.

Given open access in university applications, some groups seem to gain more places than their proportion of society would suggest; maybe their culture values education and study more than others do. To allow others entry on lower qualifications discriminates against them. If people are to be discriminated against because of something done by a group their ancestors might have belonged to, there are no limits, nor any indication as to how far back this should go. To the Romans, perhaps?

What is needed is not positive discrimination, with its unsavoury flavour of racial classification and quotas, but open opportunity for people of all groups. Instead of giving preferred places to those whose race, sex, sexual or religious preference have been discriminated against in the past, we should be making sure that we extend to all the choices and the opportunities which were more restricted in previous times. We should be creating an open society, not one where advancement depends on membership of whatever minority groups are sufficiently powerful or fashionable to command preference.

Positive discrimination perpetuates racism and dignifies it with legal claims, whereas the open society overwhelms it by being blind to a person's background. It should matter more where a person is going, rather than where they came from. It should be individual merit, not ethnic quota, which determines advancement.

17. "We should allow the police to hold suspected terrorists for a long period while the evidence is assembled."

When the law holds people in custody it has them as prisoners. Since they have not been before a court and convicted of a crime, we must be careful that this custody does not constitute a sentence without trial. If the authorities can hold people indefinitely to question them and gather evidence, they will not need a trial to sustain what is, in effect, a prison sentence. This is why the law forbids them to do so for long periods. They are required to produce the accused in person before a court of law. It is called habeas corpus and is one of the cornerstones of our liberties. The law cannot hold us incommunicado; it must produce us in the body.

The period is short, typically 48 hours, and can be briefly extended only by asking the permission of a magistrate. This cannot be repeated indefinitely; at some point the accused must either be released or charged and go to trial.

Government has attempted to extend this period of confinement to many weeks in cases of suspected terrorist crimes, but produced no good reasons to support its case. Neither Parliament nor people were told why so long a period was deemed useful or necessary.

The problem is that when police are given powers, they have used them for cases they were never intended to cover. US laws designed to stop mafia-style racketeering have been routinely used on business transgressions. A UK anti-terrorist law enabled police to detain an 80 year-old who dared heckle a government minister, and a Scottish pedestrian who walked along what was marked as a cycle track.

The law which prevents long confinement without trial is important for our liberties. Nothing has emerged to suggest that it should be over-ridden when the police wish it to be.

In a recent article in the Sunday Times property section, Phil Spencer called for the barricades to be stormed. He took great offence (no pun intended) to the fact that communities were erecting security fences and creating their own private, secluded worlds seemingly cut off from the real world that you, he and I inhabit. What he fails to understand is one of the deep psychological underpinnings of human nature: the need to surround yourself with those of a similar mentality, especially with regard to such things as property, trust and respect. Some people feel the need to wall themselves off from the threats that the wider community now carries, and in a free sociey, why shouldn’t they?

Mr Spencer claims that these gated communities separate rich from poor, cut off once publicly accessible roads and undermine law and order. But the reason for cutting off these roads to public access is that many people are failing to respect the private property and the lives of others, while the state is failing in its primary duty to provide security and administer justice. Unable to rely on traditional institutions, the residents of gated communities choose to protect their personal domain in other ways.

Throughout our lives we consciously erect barriers to others based on previous experiences and similarly exhibited character traits. We do so to protect ourselves from wider harm, trusting those with an equivalent outlook. Attempting to create a free, respectful and trustworthy society of individuals through political interference steeped in the ideas of political correctness and multiculturalism has failed. The gated communities are the burgeoning pockets of resistance, the resting place of decent civil society free from the cloying fingers of statism. Society would be stronger now if political interference over the past 50 years had not been so pervasive.

It's not just the population of the UK that faces the prospect of their private details being (mis)handled by the state machinery. Our American cousins are being harassed into accepting REAL ID, a standardization of driving licenses across the United States and the creation of an interlinked database with access enabled for all those who work for the various levels of all government within the US. In other words: a national identity card.

The recent pronouncements from the Department of Homeland Security make it very clear that unless certain actions are undertaken then access to services will be withdrawn. States have to apply for a waiver so that they can seek more time to comply with this unnecessary piece of tacked-on legislation from 2005. If States don't, then their residents will find themselves holding valid drivers licenses but unable to access federal services or, more importantly to the majority of Americans, to use their licenses' as identity when flying. The DHS will ensure that their employees will persecute any travellers who choose not to sign up to REAL ID.

If you give the keys of a brewery to an alcoholic there will be trouble, and with a government drunk on power there can only be trouble in store for Americans. As we Brits have clearly seen over the past 12 months the state is utterly useless when it comes to handling anything involving our private details is . Time after time they've lost documents, disks and laptops, compromising the personal data of their citizens. Yet if we hope to have any day-to-day functionality then we have to comply with crass legislation involving disclosure of more and more of our details.

Here's hoping that enough States stand up to this outrageous piece of legislation and protect their citizens from the overbearing federal government. The ACLU’s page can be found here: www.realnightmare.org.

Recent official documents suggest that the UK government's unpopular Identity Card scheme will not come into effect until 2012, two years later than planned. That, of course, is comfortably beyond the date when the next election has to be called. And the way the economy is going, Gordon Brown is going to need all the time he's allowed before he goes to the voters.

It reminds me of a line from George Eliot:

"An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry."

14. "The state is right to protect people from themselves."

People? That means you. Would you like to be protected from yourself? In the first case this means that the state has to take the decisions about what we do or do not need to be protected from. One step down this road and you are lost. The state might decide you need to be protected from smoking. If its scientists tell it that refined white sugar and salt are bad for people's health, it might protect people from those too. Maybe saturated fats, such as butter, as well. Maybe it should protect people from the physical inactivity which might harm them?

After deciding what it considers injurious to us, the state then takes the decision to protect us. It does this by preventing us from doing what we would otherwise have done. It can only do this by force, sanction, or the threat of the same. So the state takes away our freedom to do what we decide to do, and then uses force to make us do what it wants us to.

John Stuart Mill thought that only if someone causes or seriously risks physical harm to others should the state stop them. Should it prevent them using a dangerous bridge? No, he said. It can provide them with information, put up a sign and even urge them not to cross. But it is up to people themselves to assess the risks and take the decision. Some claim that the state knows better than we do. Unlikely, since there is no shortage of media sources telling us about what dangers we face.

And what about non-physical harm? People might be deeply distressed by your non-attendance at prayers, but that does not give them the right to constrain you into worship. The only safe rule is listen to advice, but make your own decisions and take the consequences.

The saying "buyer beware" never rings more true than when a purchase is being made on the black market. Especially when the market in question is that of illegal narcotics.

Of course, both parties seek to benefit from any free exchange, but drug transactions carry significant risks. The dealer could be arrested, or the purchaser could have an adverse reaction. Now a further risk has been added to the mix: the threat of being sued.

A Canadian woman who spent 11 days in a coma recently succeeded in suing her drug dealer. Apparently the dealer knew that the drug was "highly addictive and dangerous" but sold it to her anyway, in order to make money. (Really? I'm shocked...) This made him negligent, and liable for damages. In fact, the only reason why the case was successful was that the dealer refused to name the person in the distribution chain above him, thus moving the judge to reject his defence. The decision probably won't be too hard to appeal.

In any case, the person who has really been "negligent" here is surely the consumer, indulging in self-abuse via the consumption of drugs without regard to the harm that they can inflict. She should not have had recourse to sue. That she did is symptomatic of the ever-growing need to seek restitution from others for our own mistakes. We seem to be moving to a culture of blame rather than of individual responsibility.

People need to be made aware that sometimes, if not almost all the time, the buck stops with them.

On Wednesday, three youths were convicted of murder after kicking and beating a man to death outside his own home. His sin? Telling them off for vandalism.

Peter Fahy, Cheshire's Chief Constable, blamed Britain's drink culture and called for a 'crackdown' on cheap alcohol. Apparently, supermarkets and off-licences are to blame for selling booze too cheaply. He even claimed that some of the youths involved in the attack were "reasonably decent people who drink too much and do something stupid and attack someone".

Rubbish. These youths did not kick a man "like a football" as his daughter watched because they were drunk. They did it because they are ignorant, savage, brutal people without a shred of respect for anyone else.

Blaming supermarket prices is absurd. The vast majority of people enjoy inexpensive alcohol responsibly. Most of us drink more than we should from time to time, but it doesn't end in violence. In any case, alcohol is already more expensive and more strictly controlled in Britain than in many other European countries.

'Drink culture' is a handy excuse for the social ills that plague many communities in Britain, but it is not the real reason. It is the welfare state that has promoted family breakdown and eroded personal responsibility. It is politically-correct, target-driven policing that has abandoned our streets to violence and thuggery. And it is the rotten state school system that has left so many young people without any aspiration beyond the bottom of a beer bottle.

Ultimately though, it is the abandonment of parental responsibility that is most appalling and pernicious. And without real change, that threatens to become a vicious intergenerational circle – which will not easily be broken in the years to come.

Richard Tomkins article in last weekend's Financial Times makes explicit that the various assaults on the act of smoking have not stopped people from lighting up. The article goes on to map out the various problems facing policy makers in trying to obstruct people from smoking.

The problem with the article is that it falls into the trap as many others on this issue. It follows the illogic of the public health agenda in assuming that the government is best placed to determine whether an individual should decide to smoke. This thinking echoes the Communist paradigm of false consciousness, in its belief that the people are blind to the "truth" and must therefore have their lives decided for them. Whereas, in the real world people smoke for a plethora of personal reasons and should be allowed to continue without a government led financial and moral tirade. Personally, I smoke to relax each month upon learning how much tax the government is taking; then once more to cope with the level I‘m taxed on my cigarettes.

In the same article, attention is also drawn to the potential of Snus, a moist powder tobacco product that is consumed by placing it under the upper lip for extended periods of time. It has been shown conclusively to be a healthier intake of nicotine than cigarettes. So, will the market offer consumers the choice of a healthier nicotine intake, if they so wish? Alas, no. The reason being that it is banned by European Law in an attempt to stop people smoking. Once again, the individual is being refused his or her right to choose how to live, healthy or unhealthy.