Late last Friday (August 13th), we heard that DCLG are to scrap the Audit Commission. Having already scrapped Comprehensive Area Assessments – where the Audit Commission would grade councils based on top-down targets – getting rid of the entire quango came as something of a shock to many people.

"After years of fighting unjust and counterproductive postures, Liberty welcomes this new opportunity for reflection and correction in security policy. UnBritish scandals like punishment without charge and blanket erosion of privacy must now be replaced with effective targeted surveillance and prosecution within the law."

To put it another way, the Government scored 26 out of a possible 55 (47 per cent) for achieving our three-month targets. But, of course, there has been some decent progress on our longer-term objectives: we found the Government scored 54 out of 120 (45 per cent) for progress on first-year targets, and 64 out of 150 (43 per cent) on progress on five-year targets. We pleased to say that this assessment was picked up by the national media, with the Independent and Sky News Radio featuring the analysis.

Both conservatives and libertarians in the U.S. should watch closely the progress of this Great Repeal Bill. Many of the same conditions and complaints that led the Labour Party to plunge precipitously in support are present in pre-election America (November) and are not likely to disappear before the Presidential elections in 2012. For conservatives who wish to gain power, the coalition may serve as a role model; the Party that rolls back the size of government both as a sop to public demand and as a fiscal necessity may be the one to maintain power. For libertarians who wish to regain freedom, the process of direct democracy – as flawed as it may be – allows for the voice of reason to speak loudly.

Unfortunately the Coalition's actions are not consistent. Last week, more people's medical details were added to the Summary Care Record system than in any single week to date - 132,000. Most won't even have known they had a chance to make a choice. Saying you'll "give patients control of their records" while allowing well over half a million people's details to be sucked into a system that gives it irrevocably to NHS management is not just breaking a promise. It shows the bureaucracy is still in control.

We at IMANI are very pleased that through our pre-emptive analyses and public outcry on several media platforms, later to be supported by like-minded think tanks such as DI, we provided ‘fodder’ for our Parliamentarians to critically examine the draft loan agreement on the housing project.

There is a great danger that the Coalition's first piece of legislation will fail to achieve its stated objectives, were the Act supposed to dismantle the National Identity Scheme to end up preserving some of the more malign features of the Scheme.

Were the Identity Documents Bill to pass in its current form, rather than the complete victory on 'ID cards' that everyone seems to be assuming, we fear we shall be left with serious unfinished business.

We’ve made a start by submitting four ideas based on our research into how to cut spending:

• Increase employee contributions to all unfunded public sector pension schemes by a third
• End government funding for ‘green consultancy’ firms
• One-year freeze of the resource and capital budgets of the Department for International Development
• Reduce gross annual pay by 15 per cent for the richest 10 per cent in the public sector

As the murderous destructiveness of the Death State increases in every direction, nauseating charades of this kind will no doubt also occur with increasing frequency. I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in analyzing what so many others consider to be questions of significance: whether McChrystal violated the sacraments of the civilian-military command structure, what Obama had to do to maintain his authority as Commander-in-Chief, and so on. I would further suggest that, if you remain a civilized human being to any measurable degree, such questions should be of no concern to you. That these and similar issues of allegedly vital interest have dominated the national debate about McChrystal's "insubordination" tells you everything you need to know about how disgustingly uncivilized the United States government and its ancillary media culture are today.

But somewhere along the line the politicians, in their infinite wisdom, decided it was a good thing to subsidize risk. Sometimes this is done directly, sometimes indirectly. In the case limiting liability it is an indirect subsidy. It tells risk-takers that they won’t have to cover all the costs of their risk taking, that they can pass it on to others. In this case the politicians decided the risk takers could pass on costs of a disaster to the victims of the disaster. However, they politicians have also decided that the profits from such ventures belong to the risk-takers. They have privatized profits but socialized risk. We see this same, flawed strategy used in field after field. If there are risky credit applicants who want to buy houses the government promises to cover the losses while the banks get the profits. Bad loans are bad by the boatload and when something goes wrong there is a huge wave of defaults creating a crisis that spreads from there. Take away the downside risk, but leave intact the upside profits and you are asking for disaster. I would actually argue that disaster, under those circumstances, is inevitable, it is merely a matter of time.

We're not saying there should never be such a thing as an electronic health record [2]. We're not even asking for SCR to be scrapped immediately (though people would be safer if it was). We're just asking that all uploads be halted NOW, and that no-one else's personal health details be put at risk.

As I am always saying, I’d be happy to save the taxpayer a great deal of money by closing down the European parliament altogether, and I’d vote to do that tomorrow if I could. I’d be even more radical, and close down the EU entirely, and replace it with a simple free trade area. We could call it EFTA.

But I can’t do either of those things (yet — but I haven’t given up!).

This week the Cabinet Office took a pivotal step and released a publication revealing the salaries of all the civil servants earning over £150k. We see this as an important victory for the TPA as we've been producing our annual Public Sector Rich Lists, which show the most highly paid executives in the public sector, for the past four years.

Everything that is wrong was already "illegal" millennia ago. No new "wrong" has been discovered since the day of the Neanderthal. Evil people have tried to justify wrongs, such as slavery and theft, by passing "laws" that "legalize" them, but the nature of right and wrong did not change to suit the "law".

This means these new "laws" are invariably counterfeit "laws" ; attempts to control or regulate something other than actual aggression, theft, or fraud. Counterfeit "laws" sound like real laws. They are written in legal language by lawyers. They are backed by the threat of death if you disregard them. They have no foundation in reality, but are based only upon the wishes of people who want to control your behavior. Bad, aggressive, dishonest people, each and every one. You have no ethical obligation to obey any counterfeit "law".

It is a positive sign that the very first Bill introduced by the coalition government is one to repeal the Identity Cards Act. But the government's continued failure to act on Summary Care Record uploads, despite promising in the Coalition Agreement to "[put] patients in charge of making decisions about their care, including control of their health records" is far less encouraging.

These people have spent the past few decades talking rapturously about what high taxes can enable in the way of state solutions. Well, here are some taxes that certainly enable a few solutions. It would cut public spending by billions upon billions of pounds. It would also make me very happy!

Why should these people have pensions when ours have been made worthless by the burden of paying theirs? Or when our pensions have been made worthless by their regulatory efforts?

The state does not allow us to fire our protectors. This means submission is part of the package, whether we like it or not. Whenever the state makes a case for protecting you, what you need to do is get into the habit of substituting the word "submission" for the word "protection", or "submit" for "protect". Then see what you feel about it.

While the Minister for Identity tries conjuring up possible uses for the ID card - more fantasy than reality, but telling nonetheless [1] - the Home Office has continued to use every trick in the book to manufacture 'demand'.

Its latest manoeuvre, buried in yet another obscure regulation - The Licensing Act 2003 (Mandatory Licensing Conditions) Order 2010 - is due to come into force this October. This measure, undebated by MPs and passed on the nod, is one of the first cases where showing ID for an ordinary everyday function is being written into statute.

For various reasons that go beyond a principled criticism of our centrally-directed, vertically-structured society, the institutional order is in a state of turbulence. Political, corporate, and educational systems are increasingly unable to meet even the most meager of popular expectations. Our world is becoming more and more decentralized, with vertical systems being challenged – and even replaced – by horizontal networks governed by autonomous and spontaneous human activity. In the face of such changes, the establishment has become desperate to reinforce its crumbling walls. Because the state is defined in terms of its monopoly on the use of violence, it is not surprising to see it escalating the use of brute force in an effort to maintain its position.

What these figures clearly show is that people are becoming fed up of government projects that gather and centralize information and power. Indeed, the significant rise in the number of people who are concerned about the Big Brother state is striking. The current low standing of politicians and past scandals with lost data have surely gone some way to increase the public's aversion to the retention of personal information. However, somewhere along line, New Labour's erosion of our privacy has also caused people to switch from thinking 'If I have done nothing wrong than I have nothing to hide', to having real apprehension about government's plans.

I was reminded of one such effort as I learned of Joe Stack’s response to his own frustration. The state has expanded its powers by encouraging the rest of us to divide off from one another into conflicting groups (e.g., competing racial, ethnic, gender, religious, economic, etc., categories). What if we were to rediscover what our distant ancestors knew, namely, that what we have in common is a need for our protection as individuals? What if each of us began thinking of wars, taxation, torture, eminent domain, etc., as attacks by the state upon each of us? What if I understood that your being conscripted also enslaved me; and that I would be prepared to stand by you in peaceful opposition?

Most do it without thinking, and I doubt any of them accept any personal responsibility for their actions. “Hey, I’m just doing my job.” Yeah, you and the Nazi SS. But this is the problem that the “authority” myth creates: a bunch of brain-dead authoritarian jackasses, day after day, terrorize, extort and rob millions and millions of people. The people are then left with a choice: go after the unthinking bureaucrats whose main sin is being blindly obedient, or allow injustice to continue. Neither option is pleasant. Apparently Mr. Stack chose the former.

I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual”. Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes… isn’t that a clever, tidy solution.

I am sick to death of the way that the good and the great seem to imagine that they have a divine right to direct every detail of our lives — always, of course, for our own good. And there is a new and worrying element creeping in — the idea that health and safety legislation will always (like European Integration) go only one way. Yesterday on the BBC Today programme they were making it explicit. “The public may not be ready for these measures today, but they soon will be”.

The state capitalism that, in the 1980s and 1990s, we called Thatcherism or Reaganism was nothing approaching a free market. It was better than state socialism. But that is not saying very much. It has to some extent been our fault if ordinary people have been offered an apparent choice between a system in which a lucky few grow gigantically rich through connections and the ability to shuffle paper in the accepted ways, and ordinary people cannot buy houses and have children without going head over heels into debt – and sometimes not even then – and the present system of shadow boxing between multinational corporations and a huge superstructure of at best intrusive and at worst corrupt officials.

All these “only the guilty need fear” assurances ignore a mastodon in the living room. They assume that the government is innocent, and that it means well. They ignore the possibility that whether you’re “guilty” depends on what the government defines as guilt from one week to the next. And to the state, “guilt” primarily means threatening the class interests it represents.

A lot of left-wing activists suddenly found out they were “guilty” in 1918. A lot of Jews who, for their entire lives, had minded their own business and treated others with unfailing civility, found out they were “guilty” under Hitler. .

In fact, with those structures in place, and having grown to the point where they trump the state’s reach and power, there might not even be a need to smash the state. Prior to WWII, the French built their ultimate defensive wall, the Maginot Line, against an anticipated invasion from the Nazi regime. They thought it impenetrable, or at least strong enough that smashing it would come at so high a cost as to make it a Pyrrhic victory.

They were right. But they made an assumption that was fatal to their defenses, and ultimately fatal to tens of thousands of their people. They assumed that the Ardennes forest was equally impenetrable, and left it mostly open as a “natural” defensive obstacle. The German generals, however, knew better.

Think of yourself as nothing more than a commodity, a cow that may be milked through taxation, fines, user fees or whatever else Leviathan sees fit to impose upon you in this particular moment in time. Now that you've thought of it, please know that it is exactly what you live under. Your work, and likewise what you earn from it, is not yours to control.

The report also calls for urgent reform and lists some of the common problems that arise from such a large, expensive and pervasive quango state, such as a lack of accountability, cost, cronyism, duplication of function and taxpayer-funded lobbying.

Here's another Mikado-style punishment plan for Lord Mandelson. People who cheat on their mortgages should have their houses demolished. I know one person who would be out on the street, for sure.

As with all programs, we have to ask: what is the cost? I don't mean what the cost adds up to in terms of government spending. I mean: what is the social cost of overpricing labor relative to what the market would bear? In this case, there is no way to know in advance, but we can know that fewer people will be hired than otherwise.

And then what happens? Business goes to government hoping for a subsidy or for fully socialized medicine as a way of sloughing off the costs on the whole of society instead of bearing them directly.

Municipal governments were supposed to provide basic utilities and services in exchange for tax money. That’s it…a pretty simple responsibility.

But instead, they followed in the footsteps of the Federal government…growing ever-larger and making more and more promises without a thought for caution. Municipal governments have displayed a lack of responsibility that would find great company on Wall Street, and the piper will soon be coming around to collect his dues.

The vast majority of the public do not "willingly surrender" their money to the state in the form of taxes. In fact, the overwhelming majority are in favour of lower taxes, and the state leaving them as much of their own money as possible, particularly because they know the Government will waste and squander large amounts of it. The reason there has been a growing swing away from support for ID cards, DNA databases and internment without trial is that people are swiftly realising that their freedom is an asset like their money - if you give it to the Government, they will squander it through a mixture of stupidity and wickedness and you will be left with nothing.

If the top-down model of providing these important services were sound we should be able to expect uniform excellence after sixty and more years of honing the model. Instead we find governments of both parties launching more top-down re-structurings and constantly fiddling with their day-to-day operation. The concept of State provision is, in my view, fundamentally flawed. It does not work, it has never worked and it can never work. Government should be striving to find ways in which it can fund these services at acceptable cost to the taxpayer while keeping its interfering nose out of things it has no capacity or ability to manage.

Ministers plan to use average speed cameras, which monitor speeds over distances of up to six miles, to help enforce the new limit. The cameras have already been installed at 43 locations and the Home Office is expected to approve their wider use later this year.

Only last year, government unveiled a swathe of other proposals including six points for breaking a speed limit “excessively” which means a possible ban for just two offences.

With only 4.7% of accidents caused through ‘speeding’, the war against driving is certainly alive and well in the Department for Transport.

Raise your hand if you own a Beemer, a condo, or a $35,000 commode, or have a $35k+ bank balance.

Now keep your hand up if you really, really believe you owe one of those things to Uncle Sugar or his loan shark friends.

Look, Ma, no hands!

4. I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle. ~ Winston Churchill

What, then, is government? Is it some Strategic Monetary Reserve, in which money is stored after being extracted from the economy?

Doesn’t that view make government a giant leech?

And aren’t leeches a problem?

And isn’t the problem with leeches not so much that they refuse to inject blood/money into the system, but that they continue to take blood/money out of the system?

This single clause is as grave a threat to privacy as the entire ID Scheme. Combine it with the index to your life formed by the planned National Identity Register [3] and everything recorded about you anywhere could be accessible to any official body.

The Database State is now a direct threat not a theory.

And when these policies fail to have their intended effects, as unemployment continues to soar and prices continue to rise, it is inevitable that the Obama administration will blame people who it sees as standing in the way of their policies. The Obama administration will be tempted to go after bankers, intellectual opponents, industrialists, and corporate offices in exactly the same manner as when FDR excoriated bankers and industrialists. And, like Wilson, FDR, Nixon, Clinton, and many others, the Obama administration will be tempted to use the state security apparatus against these enemies, citing the economic state of emergency to justify it. So now the U.S. will not only be under a permanent state of emergency against external enemies, it will be in a state of emergency. This time the enemy won’t be people living a continent away… It will be us.

I have little doubt that Obama wants an additional 600,000 government workers since the trade union for bureaucrats tends to fund Democratic candidates. An addition 600,000 federal leeches will provide votes for the Democrats and a ready-made lobby group to push for more federal bureaucrats. Unlike the make-work jobs Obama will create these employees will be entirely unproductive and have negative value. The more work they do the worse we will be. Jobs creation programs are bad ideas when the "private" sector is involved but when one in five of these jobs are for more bureaucrats it's a disaster.

A few key moments from 2008 - and some ways you can help stop the database state in 2009.

The report shows that the average local authority spends almost £1 million (£971,985) on publicity. There are 6 local authorities spending more than £5 million on publicity and the 20 councils spending the most money on publicity accumulated an over £100 million bill.

With the taxpayer in Manchester funding £34 Million in pursuit of what has been proven time and time again to be an unwanted and unpopular policy, it is time for those responsible for this wasteful expenditure to be held accountable.

Second up would be a new system of doing things in future - the One In, One Out Bill. This would set the precedent that if you want to introduce a new bill, regulations or quango then you must get rid of an existing one to prevent the state becoming too large and to avoid action for action's sake.

These powers would allow the government effectively to set aside not just the Data Protection Act and data protection principles when it suits, but the much more fundamental protections of Articles 6 and 8 of the ECHR/HRA [2], of common law confidentiality and of ultra vires[3]. This goes far beyond data protection into administrative and constitutional law.

We should all be very worried by what has gone on here, particularly after Michael Martin's latest confessions. The fact that the public, the media and MPs are so incensed is a good sign that the issue is being treated with the seriousness it deserves. It is sad to note, though, that despite the bin snoopers, the boom of CCTV, the growth of the DNA database, the development of ID cards, the abuse of anti-terror laws by councils, council spy cameras hidden on public streets, the erosion of trial by jury and a hundred other violations of freedom in this country, it has taken an attack on their own personal offices and rights to get the majority of MPs up in arms. Now they are on-side, though, let us hope they take all our freedoms far more seriously.

Wow. When you look at it like that, it's hard to make a good case for the Federal Reserve. Well, if they've failed at these four core goals, then they must have been up to something. What other great things has the Fed been doing for the American people, you ask?

How about setting the stage for this massive economic collapse? That's right, Alan Greenspan's ‘liquidity experiment' and the years of effectively sub-zero interest rates gave businesses the incentive to absorb credit like a sponge and take on debt by the boatload. After all, if the government is paying you to take the money, why not?

The serious problems suffered in the UK pensions system are found to be due to political meddling and managerial incompetence on the part of inexperienced politicians, particularly with regard to decisions made for short-term political gain that have disregarded the long term needs of the pension system. The report recommends urgent reform, including reducing the unsustainable public sector pension scheme to a more manageable level.

The upshot is that when government tries to ignore the laws of economics, it throws things out of whack, makes things worse, and provides excuses for the exercise of more power. The results are undesirable from the point of view of most people: fewer and less desirable goods and services, and a shrinking of freedom as government power grows.

It is important to realize that intentions are irrelevant in this regard. The logic of human action operates with implacable regularity whether intentions are good or bad. That logic can no more be annulled than can the laws of the natural sciences.

Now I’m not a regular reader of any local paper but when this little advertisement was drawn to my attention I had to frame a copy. This is a new low in the nanny state’s control over our lives. The similarities between the army of six year old bin monitors being built by Wiltshire Council and the youth wing of the “Thought Police” are unnerving. Without a doubt, a step too far.

Having failed to convince industry and employers, the unions and the public at large that ID cards are necessary or desirable, the government has resorted to picking on soft targets - anonymous individuals seeking marriage visas or education - those who have no choice but to keep quiet and comply. And if the statements of junior minister Meg Hiller at Labour Party conference are to be believed, they also intend to target children as young as 14.

This move has highlighted the absurdity and waste of the parliament's regular monthly commute between its two seats in Brussels to Strasbourg. The annual cost of this travelling circus, just for the commuting, is £130 million, while the transportation involves 90,000 tons of unnecessary CO2 emissions. Many MEPs have been campaigning for years to end this wasteful practice, and hope that the Strasbourg roof collapse will add impetus to their campaign.

What's it for? Who's business is it that I went past Tescos at 11:15 this morning? Or that it's the second time this week I've been that way? If there happens to be a robbery when I am in the area should I expect a knock on the door? Will I be placed on a terror blacklist if I happen to pass Gordon Browns house twice in the same month?

It's certainly not to catch criminals.

“We know very well that most drivers have reached the end of the road. We aim to become a mass-membership organisation with the primary aim of campaigning for fair play for drivers. In addition, we will offer exclusive benefits and discounts to our members and seek to develop the Drivers’ Alliance into a voice which politicians and other decision-makers cannot ignore.

I urge anyone who has a view to join the alliance and help us get our message across”

Autumn 2008 will be particularly busy, with key elements of the database state - including ContactPoint (a register of all children and their parents), eBorders (collecting information about the movements of everyone) and the Communications Data Bill (phone, e-mail and internet snooping) - poised to roll forward. The Home Office will start issuing 'ID cards' to non-EEA foreign nationals by the end of the year, with airside workers not far behind.

By comparison, Government departments are so vast and varied that they are almost impossible to control, only 1 in 7 MPs have any experience of management at all and none of the Cabinet have any senior management experience, whilst the average time in office for those at the top of Government falls far short of the CEOs' requirements. The average Cabinet Minister only holds their position for 2 years, Senior Civil Servants for 2 years and 8 months, and worst of all Junior Ministers are only in the same job for an average of 20 months. This is hardly the way to run the organisation that spends hundreds of billions of pounds of our money and delivers crucial services to millions of people.

The cynicism - and grubby power grab - which lie behind this proposal is amazing. By 'only deal with major infrastructure projects' what is really meant is: 'what government decides is a major infrastructure project'. The potential for mission-creep is huge. The term 'de-politicise' is a red herring too: the Commission will actually centralise control of planning in the hands of central government. The only groups that will really be cut of the planning permission process are local government and the public.

What is clear is the growing, intense public anger the levels of waste in government. Yet there is some hope as the politicians, starting with Boris Johnson, are beginning to listen and act. Whether it’s this year, the next or even after the general election, the writing is on the wall for non-jobbers...

It is currently perfectly lawful to declare that you will not comply with the ID scheme. It is possible that refusal could be made a crime, but the government has shied away from that so far. If enough people say no, it will be impossible. There would not be enough courts to prosecute 100,000 resisters, let alone millions. Together, now, we can build a wedge of opposition that will jam the wheels of the ID scheme, and protect the personal privacy of everyone in the country.

This amounts to a disgusting assault on the privacy of the individual and family as well as council-overreach. They’re the ones with responsibility for cleaning the bins. Residents do not pay their Council Tax to be taken to court because some kid walking by threw a used can in the wrong bin. It’s sheer lunacy.

My solution? Liquidate the federal government and its assets, pay off the past-due bills, and start over again with something much smaller, less ambitious and significantly less expensive.

Steal a hundred dollars, go to jail; steal a trillion dollars, go on to fame and fortune as a public servant. Kill one man, go to the gas chamber; kill a million people, go on to well-paid retirement at public expense and big bucks on the lecture circuit. Alert children are learning these lessons, and acting accordingly when they become old enough to run for election to public office.

Government employs just under 6 million people and has an annual expenditure of almost £600 billion. Twenty senior ministers and around 500,000 civil servants oversee 1,162 public bodies, 365 NHS Trusts, 469 Local Authorities, 60 police forces (140,500 officers) and countless other local and regional spending bodies. No-one could effectively manage such an organisation, and as such British government suffers from terrible inefficiencies, waste, and ultimately depreciation in the quality of services provided.

In last week's Sunday Times, the TPA launched the full list of the UK’s vast quango industry, a detailed run-down of the staff and cost of the 1,162 bodies, boards and agencies that make up Britain’s Unseen Government. It is now five years since the Parliamentary Select Committee on Public Administration recommended that the Government publish such a list, a recommendation that the Government has failed to fulfil. In the absence of an official list, the TPA has compiled one instead, providing the public with the most comprehensive information available on the organisations that increasingly spend their money and influence their lives without democratic oversight.

After all what kind of low-life would do that to someone? When we discover that people have actually gone through other people’s computers in this manner we would think very poorly of the person who did it. In fact we would probably call it criminal. What kind of scum would do this?

That’s easy to answer. U.S. government border nazis. Here are the facts.

Yet even while his retail representatives abide by the absurd Galland Act and mark their goods with identical prices, Santa Claus is unfortunately not out of trouble. He is then an easy target for consumer advocacy groups and anti-trust regulators; the latter have just inflicted fines of 37 million euros on a group of producers and distributors of toys in France. For what reason? Santa Claus has been fined for having practiced and agreed on the same prices across different French shops!

The best environment is a capitalist environment. Trees prove that the color of a healthy environment and the color of money are the same. Mother Nature is a capitalist. Capitalists are the true greens.

We believe in the right of consenting adults to associate as they see fit. If a buyer and seller of sexual services come together and reach agreement on terms, it is an infringement of their personal freedom for the authorities to interfere.

By making ordinary life dependent on the reliability of a complex administrative system, the scheme makes myriad small errors potentially catastrophic. There is no hint from the government how it will deal with inevitably large numbers of mis-identifications and errors, or deliberate attacks on or corruption of what would become a critical piece of national infrastructure. A failure in any part of the system at a check might deny a person access to his or her rights or property or to public services, with no immediate solution or redress - "licence to live" withdrawn.

Data entered on to the National Identity Register (NIR) is arbitrarily presumed to be accurate, and the Home Secretary is the judge of whether information provided to him is accurate. Meanwhile, the Home Office gets the power to enter information without informing the individual. But there's no duty to ensure that such data is accurate, or criterion of accuracy. Personal identity is implicitly made wholly subject to state control.

Competent criminals and terrorists will be able to subvert the identity system. Random outrages by individuals can't be stopped. Ministers agree that ID cards will not prevent atrocities.

The HMRC data scandal clearly demonstrates the fallacy of "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". It is bad enough that the government can't look after families' financial details - if allowed to proceed, in a few short years the Home Office will be leaking or losing people's complete identity records. And the more data it has, the worse it will get.

People in the public sector should be paid well for good performance. But in far too many cases senior public sector officials are being paid over the odds for dreadfully poor performance, which in some cases would warrant a sacking in the private sector.

In a four-day period this summer, of the 153 hotline calls made, 75 were legislative measures, 61 were nominations, and 17 were post-office-naming bills. A few of these bills authorized hundreds of millions of dollars in new spending.

People bristle when someone attacks our government as fascist. But is that an unfair assessment - an incorrect name for our society?

As Chairman Pugsley suggested, to survive and be secure, we must engineer our lives, as best we are able, to keep ourselves, our families and our assets out of the reach of the imperial government.

"The whole idea of a DNA database is abhorrent. The Libertarian Alliance believes it should be shut down and all the data on it wiped. We certainly oppose any extension."

Betting that official wisdom is in fact official folly is probably the best bet in all circumstances. It is only official meddling in people's daily lives that caused the Brisbane rainwater tank fiasco. But the meddlers will always think that they know best. Don't believe them. It is almost certain that they will do more harm than good.

These incidents should come as no surprise. Civil forfeiture creates a conflict of interest in which police must choose between two contradictory strategies. Either they reduce crime or generate revenue. Given the fact that confiscating assets is more lucrative - and safer - than chasing possibly violent criminals, it is not surprising that the revenue generation model is increasingly being followed by law enforcement agencies nationwide.

The government has produced many excuses for their scheme, but as we will show, none of them makes any sense.

Definitely none make enough sense to justify £19 billion and the forced surrender of fifty-plus personal details.

I had always thought those in Washington might be inept, but that they were doing their best for the country. Now I hear from people that I respect, that those in our government today know exactly what they are doing, and that they are trying as hard as they can to take control of our country away from you and me, and concentrate that control in Washington.

In other words: the government routinely lies to us; the executive branch arrogates extraordinary freedom-smothering powers to itself, and its undertakings abroad are a shambles.

This has all the markings of a late-stage collapse of empire. It can’t happen too soon. The big questions are: (1) how many people will this administration kill in its final two years, and (2) what will survive of Americans’ liberty?

Illegal aliens frighten the American people for a multitude of reasons, including losing their jobs to them. But the reason there is a “crisis” is because the government plans and controls the free movements of people across the borders. That’s what happens when government intervenes in the free market — distortions and perversions occur, which then give rise to “crises,” which then cause the citizenry to support ever-increasing assaults on their own freedom.

We must accept that when those in or associated with the US Government use the phrase “national security”, that it refers only to the security of the US Government, not the people or the security of our shores. The fraudulent concept currently allows Bush and Cheney - and their many corrupt associates - to potentially hide an untold number of facts from the American people.

No wonder, then, that our economic problems center in government enterprises. Government ownership breeds insoluble conflicts, inevitable inefficiency, and breakdown of living standards. Private ownership brings peace, mutual harmony, great efficiency, and notable improvements in standards of living.

(First published September 1956).