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Cold Shower Rains on Nanny State

Hah! Any hint that a decent shower might be threatened and suddenly people are twigging to the creeping dangers of bureaucracy. Suddenly, people are thinking - hang on, every time I look, some-one behind a desk somewhere is spending their time working out what other aspect of my life needs to be micro-managed.

And it's a busy job. You need to hire policy analysts, create a new department, look at the law changes, keep the public busy making submissions on the matter, work out where to dump the submissions, run an advertising campaign, look at enforcing the new law, get industry to comply via lots of new regulations, run some damage control, get a university to study the benefits, get a different study if the results aren't so good. Go overseas and see how they did it in Sweden/Cuba/Austria, grow the department further, attend the world consortium of policy analysts for micromanaging new idea X, pay for some celebrity to say how many seals/forests/snails, and then start the process all over again.

And the bureaucracy grows bigger.

Even if the shower story turns out to not be as wet as first thought, that's really not the point. The point is, why do we even need to fight for our shower?

The latest news: National promise to let voters enjoy a full shower if they are elected. They may just win the election on that policy platform.

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