Just kill the bureaucracy

A note from Germany:

Activists who campaigned for decades for legalisation say that the rollout, closely watched by countries around the world to see how the experiment plays out, has been hampered by that most German of substances: red tape.

The hotly disputed law passed by Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition, which took effect in April, legalised cultivating up to three plants for private consumption, the possession of 50g (1.75oz) of cannabis at one time at home and 25g in public.

But euphoria at the market finally emerging from the shadows has been stubbed out by regulatory zeal and what activists call political chicanery in conservative regions where the opposition to cannabis is strongest.

Frankly, given the usual German proclivity for bureaucracy we’re surprised they didn’t make home growing mandatory.

But there’s also a note from Britain:

The planning system is the last unadulterated vestige of postwar socialist utopianism, created in 1947 by the Town and Country Planning Act and founded on the well-meaning but ultimately flawed belief that a small group of people should dictate the development of complex systems, like an economy. Or a city. So real reform by Starmer will mean taking on cherished ideas of the left.

The tales of the wholly and entirely vile corruption of the system are there. But so too is the vast cost of having that bureaucracy in the first place.

The correct answer in both cases is simply to kill the bureaucracy. Simply state that there is no regulation of the activity, there are no permissions required.

Now, the Soviets used to, when the system became constipated like this, shoot a few commissars, something that has its attractions. But given that we’re liberals, proper ones, we’ll run with just killing the bureaucracy, not the bureaucrats. The rest of the Carthaginian solution, razing the system to the ground, ploughing the land with salt, should still proceed of course.

Abolish the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors. Blow up, proper blow up, kablooie.

The result would be the most lovely housebuilding led boom, just as we had in the 1930s. The last time we actually had the private determination of the use of land. It would even solve this problem:

Green MP opposes 100-mile corridor of wind farm pylons in his Suffolk constituency

Adrian Ramsay, the party’s co-leader, will go against the Government’s net zero plans

Well, perhaps not solve, entirely, what could be considered to be gargantuan hypocrisy but at least we’d have to pay no attention to it when solving climate change.

Let’s just be liberal about it - we want to be free, to do what we want to do.

Tim Worstall