When did Cartman gain power?

Credit: Printerval

Apparently beer may only be sold in half pint cans:

Phillips busts open the industrial padlock with his power tools. Instead of tobacco he finds dozens of cardboard boxes of illegal jumbo-sized vapes — another growing business for the crime gangs. They come in from China, where they are often thought to be made by the same manufacturers as smaller legal ones. Selling at about £10 each, the haul Griff uncovers has a street value of £33,000.

…

He is frustrated at less legitimate shops springing up in the county. Juice-E, he says, has only ever sold 2ml-a-puff vapes — the UK standard — but others sell them in 20ml sizes

This is - no, really, it is - exactly the same as insisting that beer may be sold in half pint cans but not in a Party5 size. Which does seem to be giving the prodnoses just a bit too much power over us all.

Then there’s this:

Ryanair is drawing up plans to sue the CAA over an incident last month in which the regulator refused a request to transfer 177 Manchester-bound passengers, who were stranded in Faro, Portugal, to a spare aircraft that was fuelled up and ready to depart.

Eddie Wilson, who leads Ryanair’s main operating arm, said the CAA’s decision meant staff had to find accommodation for the marooned passengers, including 32 children, after 11.30pm, eventually putting them up in three different hotels. They were not able to fly back to Britain until lunchtime the following day.

As to why:

The CAA said it had shown flexibility during a transitional period, but that Ryanair now needed to add more planes on the UK register.

Mr Wilson said the UK fleet was sufficient to meet the demands of its timetable and accused the CAA of concocting an excuse for refusing a “sensible request”.

He said: “We had to get somebody out of their bed who was clearly annoyed and told us ‘computer says no’, and on a whim left 177 people stranded.”

Undoubtedly there will be different tellings of that story. But this would appear to be giving the peckniffs just that bit too much power over us all. An airline has to phone up the government to be allowed to use one of its own airplanes? It’s not that the answer was no which concerns it’s that the permission even had to be sought.

There used to be that English - and it was rather more English than British - deal. We’d have few rules, those we had would be important and near everyone would agree that the few, because they were generally agreed to be important, would and should be obeyed. Everything else would be handled by tens of millions of reasonable adults rubbing along together.

True, there were those who thought we should have a more interventionist state to crush poverty, reduce inequality perhaps, make sure that even the ragamuffins got educated and so on. Some of which we’d support, other parts not so much. But that very expansion of the state has meant that every prodnose, pecksniff and pimplenose how has the ability to insist we respect their Authoritah. A great number of the rules existing only to show that there is that Authoritah that must be respected - there’s no other possible reason for them after all.

So we’ve tried that Big Government thing, where all is permitted, licenced and permissioned and it’s not worked. For the result has been that every fool with a prejudice has been allowed to impose that upon the other 75 million of us.

Back to minarchy it is then. We are adults so let’s be free ones.

Tim Worstall