Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

Toilet Bootleggers and Other Villains
A Short Treatise on Micromanagement

This morning's newspaper reports that the British government has settled on 95% of a pint.

You see, Britons apparently believe it is the function of their government to make sure that when your bartender draws you a pint of ale, you get at least 95% liquid. Barkeeps who pour out more than 5% of foam run the risk of being prosecuted.

The article reminded me of the fact that the U.S. government regulates everything from the sizes of holes permitted in Swiss cheese to the amount of water your toilet uses to flush itself. Like a lot of laws, most of these little pieces of micromanaged tyranny probably started as well-intentioned ideas. Somewhere, at some point, someone said, "Somebody ought to do something!" And so we did. We did something, and we did something, and we did something, and we debated a law to do some more things, and we passed retroactive legislation to do some more things, and then we woke up one day to the uneasy idea that it just might be possible to get arrested for smuggling Canadian water closets.

Governments are instituted among free people to protect individual rights. That is the legitimate role of the State. For the state to control, manipulate, oversee, and otherwise regulate every conceivable picky detail of your life harms both the State itself and the quality of its citizen's lives. The State is harmed through the increasingly heavy burden of policing its laws, or through the harm to its moral authority if it passes numerous laws that it cannot then enforce. The people are harmed by the burden on their souls -- the burden of an intrusive, demanding, grasping government that will not let them be.

Constructing a web of malum prohibitum crimes intended to engineer bureaucratic Utopia seems like a great idea to some people. These are people comfortable with a pervasive prior restraint on their activities that is intended to stop all major and minor societal ills before they can be perpetrated. But what the bureaucrats forget is that a population of free people, left to their own devices to exchange value for value as traders in a free market, will create a spontaneous order that rewards the good while withholding support for the ill.

Consider our hapless British pub owner. If he wants to keep his customers, he's got to serve them more than spleen-and-kidney pie with a glass full of ale-flavored foam. All his competitor across the street has to do is hang out a sign guaranteeing more ale than his foam-spewing business opponent, and suddenly the bar business will migrate away from the lesser pub. That's the free market.

The same is true for Swiss cheese. If I know that Distributor A's cheese has holes so large it interferes with my slicing machines, I'm going to Distributor B, who sees the opportunity to increase his business at Distributor A's expense by guaranteeing me cheese holes within a certain size range.

My point is that just because something needs doing, it does not stand to reason that it is the function of the State to do it by threat of governmental force. Human beings are quite capable of dealing with one another through the market, for a wide range of human activities. Let customers vote with their feet and their wallets, rather than empowering an army of government regulators to peer disapprovingly at our taps and cheese wheels.

Reject government micromanagement. Because if you think you're not breaking any laws right now, you're wrong.