>>> Part 4 of 5...
dominance, but its presence is sufficient to be responsible for a whole 
series of measures or proposals to control, regulate, restrict and ban 
the availability of products or activities across 12 European nations in 
the name of the greater good.
The tendency even reaches out to restrict freedom of expression.  The 
Advertising Association recently identified 15 areas where European 
institutions threatened to restrict commercial free speech - food 
claims, nutrition labelling, over the counter medicines, life assurance, 
sponsorship, direct mail, distance selling, alcohol, tobacco, toys, 
financial services, cars, environmental claims, portrayal of women, 
advertising to children.
That is not even to mention the hundreds of areas and thousands of 
products that the Commission would like to define restrictively and 
regulate in the name of  - "free trade"!.  These are the people who want 
to rename milk chocolate Vegolate because it is made from vegetable fat, 
and ban hot custard tarts because they have to be defined as a cold 
food.
Thank goodness some have foreseen the dangers involved.  A few days ago 
Prince Charles, whose perceptiveness and wisdom is often not properly 
appreciated, said EC officials were poised to submit our traditional 
foods, I quote, "to the same soulless, mechanistic, clinical, 
imperatives as our built environment."  Plans to introduce upgraded 
minimum hygiene standards means nothing would be safe from what he 
described as the "bacteriological police."  He continued:  "Some vast 
department will decide what a product contains and how it is prepared.  
And mark my words it won't be able to stop interfering in the name of 
consumer protection."
The Source in the Sixties?
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To date most commentators have taken regulations, restrictions and bans 
on human conduct in isolation.  Each issue is looked at separately.  But 
a better picture emerges from the overall.  For there is a pattern and 
it is explained more by the minds of the censors than by the nature of 
the things they want to ban.
They are tidy minds. They wish to define and regulate to achieve 
bureaucratic order.  Nothing should fall outside the plan.  Individual 
eccentricity is a nuisance that must be curbed.
They are collectivist minds.  Schooled on the revolutionary campuses of 
the late '60's, they have carried this thinking through to the '90's, 
though they have cropped their hair and exchanged jeans for designer 
suits.  Students for a Democratic Society have become Bureaucrats for an 
Ordered Society.  Many are German and inherit a cultural tendency to put 
Order before Individuality.
They are Socialist minds whose vision is set on creating a 
centrally-planned Socialist Europe, where the citizen's good, whatever 
that may be, is put above the individual's right to choose, where the 
good order of the State replaces untidy personal variety and the hordes 
of mediocre bureaucrats know better what society demands (or rather 
should demand) than the great driving force of enterprise.
It is almost as if they were unaware of the dying example of the 
consequences of such an approach, right on their borders.  But of course 
in their smug arrogance and glib, self-satisfied complacency they quite 
fail to see the comparison.  After all they are acting for the greater 
good;  and they are democrats.  At the beginning Lenin said that too.
The Puritan Mentality
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These people are quasi-Puritans who have picked up the cycle I referred 
to earlier.  This new unhappy breed of Puritans wants to make everyone 
else unhappy too.  Because they are neurotic about their lifestyle, they 
want everyone to be neurotic with them; drinking, smoking, eating, 
loving, reading, running, working, laughing - all become dangerous 
activities.  In some way they have to be limited or even banned.  They 
always find a blame to place and a price to pay.
Of course living is dangerous; risks are part of the world and human 
activity.  People have to accept that and it is right that they should 
have access to the best advice modern society can provide on how to 
reduce the risks.  But no amount of legislation and direction will 
create a world without risks.  And there is a cost to every 
risk-reduction decision, even if that cost is just the narrowing of 
potential choices.  Sometimes the cost is acceptable to most, sometimes 
the decision is finely balanced, at other times it is quite 
unreasonable.  For anyone who has real respect for individual choice 
then the point of balance becomes a matter for individual decision; they 
weigh up the risks, they know the subjective cost of risk reduction, 
they make the decision.
But, as Keith Waterhouse writes: "The Puritan soul goes marching on in a 
bleak confederation of dieticians, chief constables, council prodnoses, 
Keep Sunday Special campaigners, smokists, alcohol abuse fanatics and 
condom- obsessed local authorities."
For the new unhappy Puritans are jealous of the individual's power.  
Only they can be right; they fear multiplicity of decision-making.  They 
always claim they are acting in your interest; they may even believe it; 
 >>> Continued to next message...
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 X Blue Wave/DOS v2.30 X
--- Maximus 3.01
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