Do do-gooders do more doo-doo than evildoers do?

November 19, 4:20 PMDallas Libertarian ExaminerGarry Reed

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Poetry purged from The Royal Standard pub?
(source: beerintheevening.com)
 

Libertarians have often asserted that the coercive acts of well-meaning people do more harm to society than all the consciously devious endeavors of criminals put together.

To test this thesis we need only journey as far as England, which, by almost all accounts, is just a few slithery slots below the U.S. on that long slippery slope into the world of Total Authoritarian Government Control over Everyone and Everything.

Consider this item from Ananova: Health and safety chiefs ban poetry group

The Turning Point poetry group, whose members (can’t we just see them decked out in tweed jackets with leather elbow patches and long plaid scarves looped about their necks?) take turns giving recitals on quiet Tuesday evenings in The Royal Standard pub in Ely, Cambs, has been silenced by the establishment’s landlord.

That’s because the landlord, Richard Whitmore, has been threatened with a £5,000 fine. Seems he has a license for singing, which allows “200 burly men to bounce around to whatever music they want” but he has no license for speaking.

The East Cambridgeshire District Council insists there are sound reasons for the different licenses, health and safety being two of them.

Principal environmental health officer Elizabeth Bailey elaborated: "We have licenses for all sorts of reasons - fire and police need to check it is safe - it is not just us being petty. There need to be certain checks in place."

So let’s see if we have this right: reciting a sick little limerick would be disallowed on health grounds, vocally navigating a perilous prose poem would be prohibited for safety reasons, reading inflammatory poetry would be banned by the fire inspector, and orally executing an intricate sonnet would get one arrested by the police.

As the landlord put it, “It's trivial and pathetic” which just about sums up do-gooders everywhere.

The next obvious step is the formation of a permanent Poetry Police whose purpose will be to root out and arrest all unlicensed utterers of rhythmically rhyming locutions.

For health and safety reasons, of course,
We’ll halt your lawless rhymings, by force.

Now, if you really want to get into trouble, bespeak a copyrighted couplet aloud in an American tavern. That will bring down upon your heady head the wrath of the Copyright Czar.

FOLLOWUP: We Want To Set The Record Straight On Poetry Licence
(By all means read the do-gooder’s rebuttal, but here’s the salient sentence: “At no time were we told that this event was simply poetry reading - had this been the case there would have been no problem with the current licence and the event could have taken place.” Translation: you still require a “current licence” to spout poetry in a pub in England.)