What libertarians are up against.

I hate to sound like some tedious Red Wedge comic but looking through some of the reader polls at the online pages of the Daily Mail is really fucking depressing. Want to be able to sell your company or your shares in a company to who you choose? Not if 84% of Daily Mail readers have anything to do with it.

Want to be able to drink more cheaply or, if you're a publican, to be able to make a business decision to try to increase trade by having happy hours? Again, not if 61% of Daily Mail readers get their way.

Want to have the freedom to drive in your old age providing, naturally, that you're not significantly more of a risk behind the wheel than anyone else? Well, you got that bus pass for a fucking reason you know, or so say 70% of Daily Mail readers. As pointed out in the comments, I well and truly stuffed that one up by reading the poll the wrong way round. Details, Angry old son, details.

And if you fancy a career change and you have a few skills and the gift of passing them on to others you ought to know that 67% of Daily Mail readers agree with DING* the fat foreheaded fuckwit that you can just forget it unless you have a degree.

I don't know if it's the Mail leading the thoughts of parts of its readership or the other way around, and from where I sit it doesn't matter much anyway. It just goes to show that many people are petty, small minded, authoritarian pricks who'd happily ban anyone else from doing anything not because it causes them any real harm but just because they disapprove. Show them anything that they don't do and so often you get a Pavlovian response of 'ooooh, that shouldn't be allowed, there ought to be a law against that sort of thing'. Well, thanks to fuckwits like that there's been on average a law against something new every single fucking day in Britain for the last thirteen years, and despite the fact that many of these laws have been brought to bear against the kind of people whose reflex reaction is often 'shouldn't be allowed' many of them still want more of the same.

Do we really have to end up with the government we deserve? And if so why the fuck do those of us who really do believe in freedom have to get our lives dictated by pricks whose definition of freedom is being allowed to do what they approve of?

* If I could remember who came up with the Dave Is Not Gordon thing I'd tip the bush hat their way.