Yes, of course. Nothing good has been done.

I might oppose (I do oppose) many of the help-the-poor schemes of the state, but at least I accept that the intention (help the poor) is a noble one. But the B.B.C. does not cure the sick (however poor and late the treament is practice) or give money to the old, or try and teach the young how to read and write (please no one mention “educational television”).

What the B.B.C. does is produce a few lame entertainment shows, mixed in with leftist propaganda news shows and documentaries (giving the far left view of history and so on).

It is not just the money being taken by force that I find repulsive – it is the things done with the money.

If someone (out of the goodness of their hearts) decided to fund the operations of an N.H.S. hospital that would be a good action – but to give money to the B.B.C. (to produce more of the above shows) would be a wicked action.

Sadly the commercial stations are not really better.

They to have to be “objective” – i.e. far left.

The future of Fox News under Comrade Obama?

Statutory Instruments are a broader problem than that. Some are necessary, but only an active parliament, and constitutional and procedural change will deal with their administrative abuse. (Ditto Orders in Council.)

The discussion in Lord Hewart’s the New Despotism, which ultimately led to judicial review as a constraint on administrative orders (that they have now largely found their way round), is still worth reading, though it was published in 1929.

Job 1 will be to abolish income tax.

Not only is it “Gabbean” in that it will be very hard to re-implement in subsequent, it is very libertarian in that the individual is no longer considered as State chattel to be milked, e.g. the desire to track all movement to check on “days out” for tax purposes.

Re Statutory Instruments, I’ve added the Legislative & Regulatory Reform Act to the list.

Couldn’t you pass a law giving all laws a limited lifespan, an automatic sunset clause? That way, politicians would be so busy justifying and voting on re-endorsing good laws, they wouldn’t have time to come up with look-busy laws to justify re-electing them.

Useless I’m afraid. Renewal would not involve any discussion, it would be by statutory instrument. Such as this one:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2009/draft/ukdsi_9780111473474_en_1

Parliament actually spends far less time legislating than it did 20 or 30 years ago and produces much more law. And that primary legislation is much more broadly drafted and much more designed as enabling ratgher than substantive than it was.

What’s more likely to have an effect is stopping government departments drafting law. If all the Law Commission’s recommendations had been implemented, and nothing from the Home Office in the last 20 years, then we’d have massively less, and far better, criminal law.

That is actually a doable project, because the “license fee” is one of the few taxes that people have to consciously pay out of their own pockets. Now that, thanks to Gordie, lots of Brits have no jobs and no money, this would be an ideal time for individuals to refuse to pay the BBC tax anymore.

If a national move of deliberately not paying could get some momentum, it could become a repeat of the Poll Tax fiasco, which would be positive in its own right. And anything which undermines the BBC serves the cause of truth & liberty.

I’ve posted before about what I believe to be the centrality of the firearms issue to civil liberties.

I’d seen but not read the post you link prior to commenting. Now that I’ve read it, I see that you’ve made quite a compelling case for the centrality you note.

With an unarmed populace warned (and wise) to leave all interference with crime and criminals to the police, there’s not enough threat of being apprehended — or even hindered — to so much as give the bad guys pause. To make up the manpower deficit (quoting from your link):

[The state] has taken on all the powers of surveillance that we would associate with a police state – CCTV, DNA database, warrantless searches, fingerprinting children, ID cards, in a desperate bid to convince criminals that the risk of being caught is so high as to make the effort pointless.

and

We won’t allow the law-abiding to uphold the law, so our streets get swamped with CCTV. Witnesses can’t defend themselves guns, so we have to allow anonymous evidence in court. Women can’t defend themselves from rapists, so they shouldn’t go out alone. The opinionated can’t defend themselves from retribution, so better to legislate them into silence.

Not only does taking the right of gun ownership from the citizenry make it easy for the state to take all other rights, in the way that you’ve outlined, it makes relentless encroachment against freedom inevitable.

Is it better to achieve limited objectives in the short term and give up a little ideological purity?

I don’t see how any measure that helps re-establish the primacy of individual rights in our civilization — or just helps to pull them back from the edge of the abyss –sullies any ideology that honors freedom.

Well that all went tits up!