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Laws against obesity and other sins.

Article Excerpt
THE EVENTS IN IRAQ, and other countries liberated from oppression, demonstrate the difficulty of implanting a democracy, or as in the case of Iraq, restoring the democracy that was lost in 1958. (It is often forgotten that until 1958 Iraq was a democracy--certainly not a perfect democracy, if there is such an entity, but a democracy nevertheless. Its public service was one of the more honest and efficient in the Arab world. It had a strong and prosperous economy--no one, not even the head of state, could spend public money without lawful authority. And the press enjoyed considerable freedom.)

To put in place a stable democracy, there must first be a system which has general support which ensures, through checks and balances, that government is limited, and that it can change peacefully. Freedom of speech, and its derivation freedom of the press, print and electronic, is an essential feature of such a democracy.

But there is another freedom which is usually overlooked by the academy. This is perhaps because so much of academic thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries related to the reform or even the overthrow of capitalism, of the free market and of the private enterprise system.

As late as my youth--not really that long ago--the dominant view among the intelligentsia, whether they believed in it or not, was the inevitability of socialism. Not necessary Stalinism--after 1956, it gradually dawned on the more honest Marxists that communism was flawed to its core. Nevertheless, many clung to its pale shadow, democratic socialism. This used to involve occupying the commanding heights of the economy; more recently it has been reduced to the slogan of some unspecified "third way". It is found in the anti-globalisation movement, and is sometimes lurking in the shadows behind green politics.

This mistrust of private property has proved misconceived. Democracy has been achieved, and prosperity assured, because liberal constitutionalism also assures the right to property in the free enterprise system. This truth was present long ago in Aristotle's critique of Plato, and Locke's critique of Hobbes. This is now being rediscovered, in for example, the works of David Lande, Richard Pipes...