Posted by
Greg England on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 2:19:54 PM
The Matrix
I never really understood the point of the Matrix:
"Underachiever takes a pill and discovers the world is an illusion."
Hey, any high school drop-out from the 60s could have told you that one. The Hindus use the term 'Maya' to describe the finite phenomenological world; in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig ends up in a psychiatric hospital because of it.
For this analysis however, I'm more interested in the choice of pills.
Take the blue pill, and the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
Take the red pill however, and you enter the real world.
In terms of the UK, we only have the blue pill available. The Labour Party, Liberal Democrats and Conservative Party are all competing with each other to see who can be the most liberal.
In the US however, you still have the option of taking the red pill. You can wake up, cast aside the Maya that is liberalism, and fight Agent Smith. The choice is yours.
Road Pricing
In the UK nearly 2 million people signed an on-line petition against the road pricing proposal.
So many people signed the petition, that the government has decided to put the proposal into action anyway!
The government wishes to install tracking systems in every car, so that they can charge a variable road toll and hence address congestion. This is another example of liberals making the world worse for the benefit of everyone. Never mind the civil liberties issues, never mind the fact that Friends of the Earth like the idea.
What really gets my goat is that this is an abuse of the powers of government.
As any good conservative knows, good government is government by Rule of Law. The whole point of government by Rule of Law is that everyone is subject to the same set of rules. As long as you obey the law (e.g. drive on the left hand side of the road) everyone is happy.
This scheme however, provides government with a series of levers and pulleys in which they can plan and design and manipulate exactly where the populace is allowed to drive.
Too many people driving on the A12 during rush hour? No problem, pull a lever and all of a sudden you price people away from that road. Nobody has even attempted to explain the impact on local businesses, or house prices.
Planning journeys is going to become an absolute nightmare. My sat-nav only optimises by time and distance: are the government going to buy me a replacement that also optimises by price?
How exactly does driving the long way around a congestion area save the planet?
More to the point, why don't the government mind their own business. We already have a mechanism to encourage optimum fuel usage - it's called the fuel tax.
And congestion is nature's way of telling you to find an alternative route to work!
I know Milton Friedman was in favour of road pricing, but I prefer Hayek's analysis (from the Road to Serfdom, appropriately enough):
"It does not matter whether we all drive on the left or on the right side of the road so long as we all do the same"
Of course the UK government wants to tell us where we can drive, and I want to tell them where to go.