Happiness Needs a Sense of Control

Everyone worries about happiness these days, and in Britain, Tory leader David Cameron calls for attention to the General Wellbeing (GWB) rather than Gross Domestic Product.  But Minette Marrin worries that you can’t expect people to be happy unless they are in control of their lives. 

Yet not just in charity but in almost everything else the individual is losing that sense of control or hope for the future. We live in a democracy, yet more and more people feel that they are not represented, their wishes are ignored and they can do absolutely nothing about it.

When everything is run by the nanny state then people don’t have control and responsibility for their own lives.

Illegal and criminal immigrants stay here with impunity yet at the same time ordinary people’s civil liberties are being eroded. Stealth taxes have gone up without the promised reforms. The auditing of schools is shown to be pretty much useless, maniacally exhaustive though it is, and our children are being betrayed. National Health Service hospitals are diseased and debt ridden. Nobody can think what to do about the Asbo set. Labour’s youth employment schemes, hugely expensive, have been a total failure. Pensioners are driven to despair by tax and neglect.

In other words, government doesn’t work and it is making us miserable.  But does that stop the nannies?  Certainly not.  Jonah Goldberg compiled a little list today from the NY Post.  It’s the list of all the things that New York City banned last year.

1. pit bulls;
2. trans-fats;
3. aluminum baseball bats;
4. the purchase of tobacco by 18- to 20-year-olds; f
5. oie gras;
6. pedicabs in parks;
7. new fast-food restaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods); lobbyists from the floor of council chambers;
8. lobbying city agencies after working at the same agency;
9. vehicles in Central and Prospect parks;
10. cell phones in upscale restaurants;
11. the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., because of a unionization dispute;
12. mail-order pharmaceutical plans;
13. Candy-flavored cigarettes;
14. gas-station operators adjusting prices more than once daily;
15. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus;
16. Wal-Mart.

People need control over their lives, but instead we have the nanny state prescribing in ghastly detail what kind of fat we may eat.

The rule of thumb for a free society should be that it infringes liberties rarely, but when it does so it is for important reasons.

Yeah.  So what are we going to do about it?

We could take back control of our lives from the state.  Then we will be freer, and probably happier.