Jamie Whyte in The Times is a paragon of rational liberalism. Today he neatly skewers the fallacious thinking of those who impose their own heirarchy of values and risk aversion on the rest of us.

Doctors, he points out, will tend to overvalue health relative to other goods, such as pleasure. They "confound what is good for us with what is good for our health." And this analysis is readily applicable to the army of experts who struggle to control us and get use of our taxes to pursue their own preferences. They all fail to accept that other people have different tastes that in conditions of liberty are traded-off by those people.

Jamie Whyte again:

Politicians always claim that their safety regulations are motivated by concern for people in dangerous jobs. Yet the beneficiaries are always people who do not do dangerous jobs. Workplace health and safety meansures are a zero-sum game in which wealth is transferred from the brave to the timid.

And yet, I think Whyte here simplifies and understates the case. He concentrates on the loss of 'danger money' to workers if the market price of the safer jobs falls. That, adding in workplace costs, might look like a zero-sum game, but a business is not a closed isolated system linking effectively infinite reservoirs of labour and capital.

The cost of complying with regulations is not transferred between internal costs and neatly compensated by changes in the labour market. The costs must be borne by customers and workers and capital in an uncertain proportion, and may force the business to shrink or restructure. And some of those costs are transfers of wealth to new players: regulators, inspectors, compliance officers, policemen, lawyers, prison officers, and the businesses that spring up to sell advice, form-filling guides and special stationery to all of the other new players and the businesses trying to minimise their attentions.

I think Whyte is mistaken when he asserts later in the same article that "left to his own devices a profit-seeking employer would get workplace safety exactly right". Employers are often irrationally optimistic—in the modern world they need to be to become employers. But that does not change the fact that the imposition of any new form of compliance on an industry makes all its existing workers, businesses and customers collectively financially worse off, though it may change the balance between them.

The quantity of inspection, regulation and statutory record-keeping is a measure of how much worse off, in financial terms, we are than otherwise we would be. State intervention is never costless, never self-financing, though differing people may end up paying. A would be regulator ought therefore to adduce non-material benefits for what he wants to do sufficient to convince the people affected. Unfortunately it is more likely, as Whyte points out, that his choices will reflect his own preferences. And worse, his preferences when someone else is paying.