Adam Smith Institute

An announcement that the National Weights and Measurements Laboratory (NWML) is considering introducing a ‘two-thirds of a pint’ measurement into pubs across Britain raises questions as to why publicans and drinkers cannot deal in any quantity they want.

Left to the free-market, consumers would be free to demand whatever quantities of drink they wanted and firms would satisfy those demands in order to make greater profits. Even if the government did not choose to regulate the size of drinks we consume a system of standardisation would no doubt emerge, but one which was more responsive the needs of drinkers rather than being dictated to them.

The arguments for state intervention in the quantity of our drinks seem somewhat restricted from the outset. Perhaps the government thinks that it can tackle the over consumption of alcohol as people will no longer be forced to have a whole pint. This would be a narrow and ineffective goal for the government to aim for.

Why does the state decide what size glasses our alcohol must come in but they do not apply the same logic across the board? For example, when ordering soft drinks, some pubs fill the glass with ice before serving, others do not. The government has not felt inclined to interfere here, so why elsewhere?

Essentially, we should be able to say how much we drink and in what size glass. At the very least, this would lead to a much better allocation of resources when purchasing drinks!

The front-page of yesterday’s Sunday Times revealed that the government intends to require the production of a passport by anyone purchasing a mobile phone. The reason? They want to know who owns every phone used in the UK, so that they can electronically track all of us, all of the time.

Even when no call is being made, mobile phones send out a signal to the nearest telephone masts, making it possible to work out the phone’s location. The government intends to link this information with the DVLA’s car registration database and the police’s automatic license plate identification system, to make keeping tabs on us that little bit easier. The government also intends to create a new database which will store the details of every single electronic communication made in the UK.

It really makes me wonder what kind of a country we are living in. Will the current government ever realize the George Orwell did NOT intend 1984 to be used as an instruction manual? Somehow, I suspect not.

Instead, the government is bound to say that only the guilty have anything to fear and that unless we have something to hide, we should all march (or should that be goose-step) happily down the road to electronically-tagged serfdom , safe in the knowledge that Big Brother is on the side of the angels. That’s the excuse that all tyrants use, and I don’t expect our ones to be any different.

The problem is that it isn’t true. The very existence of that kind of information and that degree of centralized power is a threat – regardless of the intentions that lie behind it. These powers will be abused and the data’s security will be compromised. It is so predictable that you would be a fool not to see it coming.

Everyone who values freedom, regardless of their political affiliation, should fight these proposals and others like them every step of the way. It is not just a matter of practicality or expense: liberty matters in and of itself. We are not the possessions of government, and it’s high time we reminded them of that.

Hat-tip to Chris Weston, the comic-strip artist behind the fantastic image accompanying this blog.

Fascinating stuff this, like a press release from the Howard League on how we should treat criminals.

I'm sitting in Oslo having lunch with the director general of the Norwegian prison service – Kristin Bolgen Bronebakk – and we are discussing "Scandinavian exceptionalism". In other words, why is it that Finland, Sweden and Norway in particular, have much lower rates of imprisonment than other European countries?

Isn't that wonderful? They've managed to design a system where those who employ their rapacity upon their fellow citizens do not end up warehoused, locked in a cell for 23 hours a day, in a Victorian building. Perhaps there's something we might learn from this system, how do they do it?

Oslo had the highest rate per person in Scandinavia in terms of reported crimes, with 90 reported crimes per 1,000.

Copenhagen had 50 crimes reported per 1,000 and Stockholm had 79.

In New York, there were 22 reported crimes per 1,000 inhabitants.

As economists have endlessly pointed out, it's not just punishment for crime that reduces crime. It's a combination of the severity of the sentence, the conditions of serving it plus the liklihood of detection and conviction. All those together add up to the expected punishment for a particular action.

And whatever else the Norwegian version of social democracy might have to tell us here it seems clear that not locking up criminals does not reduce crime.

So that's one more thing that we know not to do then.