It's embarrassing to have just written a post (which Tyler, damn him, immediately upstaged) ruminating among other things on the changing definition of privacy, only to discover that Great Britain has already made my own paranoid musings obsolete by putting thousands of families on government surveillance inside their own homes : THOUSANDS of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, Ed Balls announced yesterday. The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes. They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals. Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction. Around 2,000 families have gone through these Family Intervention Projects so far. But ministers want to target 20,000 more in the next two ye...

The problem with policy via anecdote is that the inevitable horror stories among any health care system that attempts to serve a population of 300 million people will exercise disproportionate weight over statistical analysis. This is because the math literate speak quantitative and the non-math literate speak qualitative. So take into account not individual horror stories but systematic restrictions of care when the government becomes involved in dictating what is best practice , it is interesting to look at Great Britain where, as noted in WSJ , if you are going blind due to treatable macular degeneration, the government will only approve treatment for one eye: In 2007, the board restricted access to two drugs for macular degeneration, a cause of blindness. The drug Macugen was blocked outright. The other, Lucentis, was limited to a particular category of individuals with the disease, restricting it to about one in five sufferers. Even then, the drug was only approved for use in on...

... in the name of State security. From Yahoo : In a move that even the most nonchalant of privacy advocates is crying foul over, the UK has put into effect a European Union directive which mandates the archival of information regarding virtually all internet traffic for the next 12 months. The program formally went into effect Monday. The data retention rules require the archival of all email traffic (the identities of the sender and receiver, but not the contents of the messages), records of VOIP telephone calls (traditional phone calls are already monitored), and information about every website visited by any computer user in the country. The rules are being pushed down "across the board to even the smallest company," as every ISP large or small will be required to collect and store the data. That data will then be accessible -- to fight "crime and terrorism," of course -- by "hundreds of public bodies" to investigate whatever crimes they see fit.... Th...

Even in Europe, not everyone believes the rush toward more statism is a good thing. From the Times : THE leader of the Czech Republic, which holds the rotating European Union presidency, has warned that a “Europe of states” is in danger of turning into a “state of Europe”, legislating on almost every aspect of people’s lives but lacking in democracy and transparency. In an interview with The Sunday Times, President Vaclav Klaus drew parallels between Brussels and the failed communist dictatorships of eastern Europe. “My criticism is based on the sensitivity towards attempts to restrain freedom and democracy, and it does relate to the fact that for most of my life I lived in a political, social and economic system which was not free and was not democratic,” he said. Klaus also predicted that Gordon Brown’s attempts to produce a European solution to the global economic crisis in time for next month’s G20 summit in London could make the problems worse. Klaus, 67, an economist by training...

Given that the European Union economy and population are comparable to that of the US, it is pretty normal to find Americans from all political ideologies making comparisons. This week, for example, Dana questions why we don't consider bank nationalization on the Swedish model, while the latest judicial attack on free speech leaves Becky believing that Europe is lost . My point today is not to argue that either of them is right or wrong, but to illustrate the fact that such comparisons are often less than useful, because in many important ways America is not like Europe at all . Let's start with a basic difference of political economy, true since the early colonial days: in Europe, land was expensive and labor was cheap--so cheap, in fact, that the people on the land (or at least their labor obligations) were often sold with the land). In America (not counting those pesky Indians), land was cheap and labor was expensive, a situation pertaining right up through the heavy in...

... because, after all, people ingesting alcohol shouldn't have to put up with drug users in their midst, should they? From the BBC : Pub-goers in Aberdeen are facing a drugs test before entering bars as part of a crackdown by Grampian Police. Officers in the force will be the first in Scotland to use an Itemiser - a device which can detect traces of drugs from hand swabs in a matter of seconds. The test is voluntary, but customers will be refused entry if they do not take part. They could be searched and even arrested if traces are found. The device was trialled by the police force in the area earlier this year. The Itemiser allows police officers or door staff to swab customers hands as they enter a pub or club. It can tell almost instantly if drugs are present - including cocaine, cannabis, heroin and ecstasy. The device can show three possible results: green, amber or red. Customers who get a green reading are allowed entry to the pub, those who get amber are given a drug infor...

From the UK Telegraph [with h/t to The Libertarian Alliance }: Local authorities have ordered employees to stop using the words and phrases on documents and when communicating with members of the public and to rely on wordier alternatives instead.... Bournemouth Council, which has the Latin motto Pulchritudo et Salubritas, meaning beauty and health, has listed 19 terms it no longer considers acceptable for use. This includes bona fide, eg (exempli gratia), prima facie, ad lib or ad libitum, etc or et cetera, ie or id est, inter alia, NB or nota bene, per, per se, pro rata, quid pro quo, vis-a-vis, vice versa and even via. Its list of more verbose alternatives, includes "for this special purpose", in place of ad hoc and "existing condition" or "state of things", instead of status quo. In instructions to staff, the council said: "Not everyone knows Latin. Many readers do not have English as their first language so using Latin can be particularly diffic...

Read it here . It's too long to repost, and too interconnected to do justice to with an excerpt, but here's a tease: In the European labor markets, mobility is almost impossible. The union system is built to protect current high-skilled workers from competition from new workers, whether in the same country of from abroad. Large corporations that form part of the cozy governance of the country are protected from new competition, and are bailed out by the government when they hit the rocks. As a result, unemployment is structurally high in countries like France and Germany, hovering for decades between 8 and 12% -- levels we would freak out at here. Young and/or unskilled workers have a nearly impossible time breaking into the labor market, with entry to better jobs gated through apprenticeships and certifications that are kept intentionally scarce. Joe the plumber is an impossibility in Europe. Some Americans seem to secretly love the prospect of not easily being fired from...

Gerald Toben is an Australian anti-Semite who runs the Adelaide Institute . Pretty offensive stuff; so if you click the link, you're on your own. But I support the concept of free speech--especially political free speech--even when it is offensive. Unfortunately, as Classically Libera l chronicles, the long arm of the ... law [or something that pretends to be the law] can reach out and touch you in sorts of ways: In Germany the government has passed laws making it illegal to “question” the Holocaust. The law is quite vague. It says one may not “play down” the Holocaust or “defame” the dead. Numerous Jewish historians, however, have played down the numbers of dead during the Holocaust. They said previous estimates were too high. They are not bothered by the law as it is applied selectively. Toben, and others like him, are considered bad people by German law. And perhaps they are. But expressing an opinion doesn’t violate any natural right of an individual. As Thomas Jefferson expre...

As JD Tucille at Disloyal Opposition put together the story, Nicholas Sarkozy's France is only reluctantly backing down on the intrusive use of its universal surveillance and data mining tool EDVIGE, which would have helped the Gauls break into the Big Leagues of European democracies which spy on their citizens: Sweden.... ...where you can be criminally charged for blogging about domestic surveillance The Netherlands.... ...where cops can wire tap any phone at will as long as the crime they claim to be investigating carries more than a 3-year jail term Italy.... ...where the judges are actually essentially investigative prosecutors and approve their own wire taps And, in fact, the whole bloody European Union is rapidly becoming a police state, as Statewatch reports: In 2006 a Directive on the mandatory retention of all communications data across the EU was adopted. Service providers are obliged to keep and give agencies access to records of all phone-calls, mobile phone calls ...

As they apparently do in England: A cancer charity has today published research that shows doctors are keeping cancer patients in the dark about new treatments that could extend their lives . Myeloma UK, which conducted the research, said a quarter of myeloma specialists questioned in a survey admitted hiding the facts about treatments that may be difficult to obtain on the NHS. The main reason given was to avoid distressing or confusing patients. Myeloma is a bone marrow cancer that affects around 3,800 people each year in the UK. Of these, 2,600 are likely to die from the disease. Yeah, the wonders of state-run health care. [h/t Coyote Blog ]

From, of all places, NPR : After the energy crisis of the 1970s, France invested heavily in nuclear facilities, and today the country is much less dependent on foreign oil. Environmentalists cite safety concerns, but the French government and the powerful nuclear lobby seem determined to press on toward their goal of using nuclear power to achieve energy independence. On the coast of Normandy overlooking the English Channel, sits the nuclear power plant at Flamanville. Its two reactors generate enough electricity for the entire regions of Normandy and Brittany. France has 58 nuclear plants like this which meet 80 percent of its total electricity needs -- and allow it to export power to Britain, Germany and Italy. But, of course, that's one part of Europe's superior civilization that we don't even want to think about emulating, right?

This one is several months old, but is one of my favorites from Nanny Knows Best , chronicling the folly of creating a Progressive State in England wherein the government has the power to use force to DO GOOD. And the good they're doing? Banning fire extinguishers because you might try to use them (so help me) to put out fires: It transpires that those appliances that you and I assume are there to help us fight fires, fire extinguishers, are a clear and present danger to our health and safety. That at least is the view of Nanny's chums in Hamilton Townsend, managing agents for a block of flats in Bournemouth. A risk assessment (pass the sick bag) was recently carried at Avon House and Admirals Walk by a buildings risk assessor, these people make a very nice living on the back on Nanny's rules and regulations (under the Regulatory Reform Fire Safety Order 2005 the managing agents of every private block of flats must hire professional assessors to carry out a risk assessmen...

Europe, as Progressives never tire of explaining to us when speaking of health care, or education, or snails for dinner, is the gold standard of civilization. If it works in Europe, and we're not doing it, it's another reason that all values but Progressive values (governmental force in the service of an ideology) are bankrupt. So, in the interest of furthering America's understanding of the European Statist Utopia, here's a post from Nanny Knows Best about the latest British good government idea : taking fat kids away from their parents: David Rogers, the LGA [Local Government Association] spokesman on public health, said: "Councils are increasingly having to consider taking action where parents are putting children's health in real danger. Councils would step in to deal with an undernourished or neglected child, so should a case with a morbidly obese child be different? If parents place children at risk through bad diet and lack of exercise is it right for ...