Is mankind's highest ideal to live without
incident or adventure? And if so,
when did this begin?

This morning, I woke early and finished The Great European Rip-off: How the Corrupt, Wasteful EU is Taking Control of Our Lives.  I then discovered this article in the Telegraph:

The global financial crisis has inflicted such damage to free market principles that it risks undermining the core function of Brussels and triggering the disintegration of the European Union, according to the EU’s most revered economic figure.

…

Former Italian premier Massimo D’Alema said the EU’s modernisation drive sketched at Lisbon in 2000 was fantasy. “We are prisoners of our rhetoric,” he said. “It is an illusion to think that once crisis is over we will return to where we were. The US and China will emerge stronger: we will be left ever further behind. Within 15 years not a single country in the EU will qualify for the G7, except perhaps Germany.”

via EU faces ‘existential’ danger from economic crisis – Telegraph.

In this context, it is vitally important to form a strictly pragmatic view of the EU and whether it will help or hinder our recovery.

Craig and Elliott wrestle courageously to deliver just that in The Great European Rip-off, though the title rather gives away their conclusions. It seems to me any objective review of the EU would conclude that it is an exorbitantly expensive threat to our prosperity and freedom.
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I am an Associate Member of the Centre for Policy Studies and I always enjoy reading their pamphlets: they remind me I am not alone. I caught up with the following four yesterday on the train. The theme? Putting humanity back into our society.

Click the images to download the pamphlets as PDFs.

The Reality Gap – an analysis of the failure of big government demonstrates that more government means worse. Jill Kirby writes of voter disenchantment and indicates that, in the EU elections, “Only one voter in 11 voted for the runaway winners, the Conservative Party”.

Jill provides and explores:

five techniques which have been deployed by the Government to create the appearance of success, while presiding over failure:

• Moving the goalposts
• Declaratory legislation
• Government as public relations
• Data collection
• Complex structures, procedures and language.

In particular, from the chapter Declaratory Legislation:

A 2008 survey by Sweet and Maxwell found that Margaret Thatcher’s Government introduced an average of 1,724 new laws every year. That rose to 2,663 under Tony Blair and in the first year of Gordon Brown’s regime the annual total reached 3,071.

This frenzied legislative activism can only be ignored by ordinary people. It puts me in mind of Jamie Whyte’s article Am I a Criminal? I haven’t a clue:

This Government has relentlessly undermined the rule of law by its vague legislation and constant meddling

Jill concludes that “The only answer is a significant reduction in state control” — I could not agree more.
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Via The Conservative Party | News | Speeches | David Cameron: Giving power back to the people:

The British state has developed over centuries into a powerful entity charged with delivering important goals.

To protect its citizens from internal and external threat.

To redistribute wealth from the richest to the poorest.

To ensure public services – education, healthcare, welfare – are there for all who need them.

These things have helped make our country a place which is safer, fairer, and where opportunity is more equal. But the more the state does, the greater the risk that it gradually becomes master over the citizens it’s meant to serve. That’s why we have traditionally created checks to keep the right balance of power.

Checks to stop the state exerting too much power over us, in other words, protecting personal freedom. And checks to help us exert power over the state, in other words, ensuring political accountability.  But the last twelve years of Labour Government have diminished personal freedom and diluted political accountability. Today, I want to talk about both.

After first reporting on the book here, I have finally returned to read it in detail; it is Cromwellian:

‘I find the country bleeding, nay, almost dying,’ Oliver Cromwell told MPs in 1644. what made him angry was not simply that people were suffering, but that Parliament was part of the problem. ‘The People are dissatisfied in every corner of the Nation,’ he raged, ‘all men laying at our doors the non-performance of these things that had been promised’.

Today, people are not so much dissatisfied as fatalistic. No one expects any party to cut taxes, make public services work for their customers, reverse the flow of illegal migration or restore Britain’s independence. Voters half sense that some politicians would like to do these things; but they know in their bones that the system is loaded against reform. ‘Nothing ever really changes,’ people protest; and, in a sense, they are right. Elected representatives have progressively ceded their powers to self-interested and inert bureaucracies – in Brussels as much as in Whitehall. With the best will in the world, there is remarkably little that politicians can change. Small wonder that fewer and fewer people vote: as matters stand, abstention is a rational decision.

Things don’t have to be this way. Other countries give meaningful power to their citizens, both as consumers of government services and as voters. In Britain, too, the rise of the quango state and the decline of Parliament are relatively recent phenomena. What’s done can be undone.

I thoroughly recommend the book. With so much incompetence to contend with, we need comprehensive and, above all, practical inspiration.