If a few men go out to sea in a small boat to catch fish - say haddock - and one of them catches a cod, that must now be reported to the national government, which must report it to the EU, which will deduct that codfish from the national quota that professional fishermen are allowed to catch.
The EU pretends that it is allowing more latitude to national and regional governments: but, as this new regulation about cod fishing shows, it is merely building up intrusive bureaucracy.
A parallel point was made by Mervyn King in his Edinburgh speech on October 20, 2009. Detailed regulation is mere regulation: bureaucracy is just costly bureaucracy: and clever Dicks who know how to manipulate the fringes of legality to their own gross advantage will always outsmart the deskbound rulemakers. The bankers have been given greater power to ruin the economy than they had on New Year's Day 2007; and they can safely assume that there will always be a Gordon Brown to lead the next bail-out. This will be true until the idiocies of the historical Economics establishment have finally been abandoned.
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