Are revolutions and strong politics are good thing, or a bad thing, Isle of Wight County Press columnist, Jim Gibbons, asks.

THE motto of the French Revolution was Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

One of my teachers ( for the avoidance of doubt, my education did take place after that revolution) who was not only a French teacher but also a teacher of French, was startled to find that English schoolboys of the day, brought up on tales of the Scarlet Pimpernel, considered the revolution to be a bad thing.

Since 1789, politicians have tended to fall into one of two camps: those who think that more liberty is the priority and those who prefer equality; there has often been a battle between the two.

Take for instance rent control — better named as rent restriction, as no politician has ever recommended landlords to increase rents.

Politicians have frequently decided that leaving rents to be quantified by the simple process of supply and demand will result in rents which many people cannot afford, have decided that help should be provided by landlords rather than by the people at large, the common wealth.

By enacting that rents must be less than those resulting from bargaining, they have ruined the property market in many places and decades, with landlords giving up and heading for the wide blue yonder and potential landlords choosing some other occupation and thus causing shortages of rentable accommodation.

Did I hear you murmur “Well, tenants have more votes than landlords?” Wash your mouth out with soap!

In the field of employment, potential employers are hamstrung by so much legislation that personnel management, more recently “Human resources” (how do you like being a human resource?) is a well-paying occupation which adds nothing to human happiness, and lawyers can make a good living understanding half of it.

If people and companies were freer to hire and fire, and if there were no minimum wage there would only be “frictional” unemployment.

Certainly there would be some whose skills would not command a living wage, but that cost should be for the country to bear rather than an employer.

Paternalism was never a good policy; every man is an entrepreneur like his boss, whether he is selling goods or his services.

Certainly big employers have more influence on e.g. wage rates than an employee does, just as a rich concern can “corner the market”; the answer to that is for the state to break up any concern which has enough monopoly power to affect the wage rates (or any other price) on its own.

The recent vacillations and surrenders of governments to banks which are “too big to be allowed to fail” brings some of us to despair.

Even in the field of personal relations, I can imagine laws being brought in requiring us to have the approved proportion of friends of all the main facial complexions, and more laws to ensure that those standing for public office should hold the politically correct views on say, climate change.

Perhaps each and every one of us will end up having to sign something like Henry Vlll’s Act of Supremacy.