Speaking of prime minister Boris Johnson and chancellor Rishi Sunak (among other British politicians), the Financial Times notes (“Police Issue 50 More Fines over Westminster ‘Partygate’ Breaches,” May 12):
Johnson, his wife Carrie and Sunak were last month fined £50 each for attending an illegal birthday party held at Downing Street in June 2020.
That politicians or other rulers fall under the laws they have imposed on ordinary citizens should be a cause for celebration as one realizes the size of the spider web these rulers have spun against individual liberty. Even if one grants that the recent pandemic was a special emergency, the very concept of “illegal birthday party,” also enforced on one’s own property or with the permission of the property owner, dramatically illustrates how government power has grown and how monstrous Leviathan has become.
This must be due to “neoliberalism,” the recent decades of deregulation and wild-West liberty that authoritarians (and some mistaken analysts) imagine as a scapegoat for everything wrong in today’s world!
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
May 15 2022 at 7:40am
I think that most of what is wrong with the works is the failure to apply neoliberalism — decision making according to cost-benefit analysis combined with los deadweight loss transfers of incomes.
In principle some restriction on social interactions at a time of high COVID case loads make sense; they should be a way to get people to internalize the negative externality of spreading the disease. In practice this was not very will done. maybe not enough in elder care facilities and too much in many other venues. But there is nothing wrong with having actual penalties for causing externalities.