Ship of Fools Girt by Sea

Here’s an interesting little story – http://bit.ly/1LcWoTh

The thesis of this story is that there are a few idiots in Australia and to protect these idiots from themselves, and to protect the rest of us from them, that the nanny state was thus born and propagated.

I beg to differ.

We have in Australia a lot of idiots, the majority me-thinks, that believe that ‘the government’ should fix every problem that arises (as some highly publicised incident on TV or in the papers) by regulating against what is seen as the ‘root cause’.

This is essentially OH&S gone mad in the social-political environment. There is a whole industry of fools beavering away at engineering all risks out of our lives.

And we go along with the program. There is no mechanism to protest against it. Social media protest groups like Getup are after all simply part of the problem. Whine, protest, fix, repeat…

In Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts wrote ‘The politics of fear. I hate politics, and politicians even more. They make a religion of being greedy.’

He was right, those greedy bastards only see upside in shoving regulations even further up our orifices. They aren’t going to fix the problem. I doubt that I will ever see a ‘Scrap the Regulations’ party that garners more than a handful of votes.

Thus we have bike helmets, pub lock-outs, drinking and smoking laws up the wazoo, noise restrictions, 4 meter rules, 50 meter rules, and the list goes on ad infinitum. They are even enforcing jay walking rules now – really!

We have so many rules here that seem to stifle creativity and spontaneity and fun. And unfortunately we can only blame this on the many. The idiots.