by Matthew Bransgrove | Sep 30, 2015 | The Legislature
Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. —Friedrich Hayek. Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. I, 1973. Every restriction,...
by Matthew Bransgrove | Sep 30, 2015 | The Legislature
You put a duty on paper, and by-and-by find that … you have inadvertently taxed figured silk, sometimes to the extent of several shillings per piece. On removing the impost from bricks, you discover that its existence had increased the dangers of mining, by preventing...
by Matthew Bransgrove | Sep 30, 2015 | The Legislature
When railways, toilets, telephones, television, air travel and automobiles were all first invented, only the very wealthy could afford them. A politician back then could have seen this as an evil and decided that with one great concerted coerced effort these bounties...
by Matthew Bransgrove | Sep 30, 2015 | The Legislature
The parents of a child spend every waking hour watching, caring, considering, and adjusting to the child’s needs. Were the government to employ a million experts to tell them the optimum time for children to go to bed and then decree that all children must go to bed...
by Matthew Bransgrove | Sep 30, 2015 | The Legislature
But when I remember how many of my private schemes have miscarried; how speculations have failed, agents proved dishonest, marriage been a disappointment; how I did but pauperize the relative I sought to help; how my carefully-governed son has turned out worse than...
by Matthew Bransgrove | Sep 30, 2015 | The Legislature
As the alchemist attributed his successive disappointments to some disproportion in the ingredients, some impurity, or some too great temperature, and never to the futility of his process or the impossibility of his aim; so, every failure of State-regulations the...
