Although it strikes me that beneath the habitual anti-regulatory huffing, Worstall isn’t into market purism either. In his case the deviant pleasures of Volk and Echtheit tempt him from the path. He spurns the brisk, pragmatic, successful Thatcher who signed the Single European Act and embraces the downfall Thatcher whose europsychosis has tortured the Tories ever since.

You’ve got the wrong bank. RBS isn’t Northern Rock. It blew up through stupidly buying a Dutch bank at the very top of the bubble (remember, in Worstallistan there is no such thing – you believe in the EMH after all) which had stupidly bought a vast quantity of mortgages at the very top of a housing bubble (remember, in Worstallistan there is no such thing – you believe in the EMH after all) and stupidly written insurance on a whole lot more bubbly mortgages and loans against the possibility that it (and Tim Worstall) was wrong, thus doubling down on the bet.

Further, of course, the banking system with deposit protection is liable to runs; we had one, which in a world where the rational expectations hypothesis was true (like Tim Worstall’s) wouldn’t have happened. You should indeed be embarrassed to be arguing that something that indubitably happened couldn’t happen.

Then why are you complaining about it in an EP thread? Compared to most national versions, the EU’s standard setting practices seem quite capable and sensible.

Your point seems to be “If there is a political issue, we should make it a non-political by doing it the way Tim Worstall likes it”

I’m not sure why the “revelation” that banking systems without deposit protection schemes are liable to runs (and a useful description of the current problems is that the shadow banking system and that part of it dependent upon wholesale rather than retail deposits did not have such a deposit protection scheme) should change my views of the correct legislative manner of addressing the composition of compotes.

That it is legal to add apple geranium leaves to jams and jellies made from quince but it is illegal to do so to jams and jellies made from gooseberries of kumquats doesn’t, as far as I can see, have very much to do with the banking system.

“historically been enlisted in different national armies which have used standards to bog down the other side”

Such regulation by politicians is never used to favour the incumbents with the power and money to lobby the politicians then? Recent revelations in the House of Lords would seem to argue otherwise.

Note that I am not arguing that the EP is uniquely wrong in this. Rather that politics isn’t the way to deal with such standards setting.

“And as a second aside – metals are a quite different animal than consumer goods, as presumably the final consumers in the metal-bashing industry have sufficient technical knowledge themselves to judge tolerances etc.”

The contention is that consumers are such fools that they cannot spot a banana of such excessive curvature that they do not wish to purchase it?

Anyway, come to think of it, there are a small group of key industries that have turnover of more than $1 trillion; food, utilities, pharmaceuticals, telecoms/IT, armaments, and I believe, the illegal drugs trade. I note that all of them except for one have a very significant chunk of government or quasi-government enforced standardisation. Food – Codex and similar things, folk aren’t keen on melamine. Utilities/energy – yup. Pharma – the whole business model is obsessed with patents, and drugs are always subject to fairly rigorous regulation. Telecoms – tell me about it. Armaments – NATO standards, they even invented POSIX.

Cocaine dealers? Well, they ain’t much for standardisation, even if they did formerly have an industry association down in Colombia. But I think that’s an example that strengthens my point.

Meanwhile Charlemagne’s complaint that “the biggest problem I have is with its claims to democratic legitimacy” goes unaddressed in Henry’s post.

And even if Graham Watson stands at a bully pulpit denouncing assaults on “human rights, dubious forms of cross-border information exchange, extraordinary rendition and so on”, what has this bullying actually achieved?

We are, after all, to have our criminal records databases linked up. Rendition did happen. Air passenger lists are indeed being shared. We will have biometric passports.

Complaining about “venality” is missing the point, according to Henry. OK, so what is the point? It seems to be that the Parliament are pushing certain issues, particularly in JHA where national parliaments can’t keep an eye on what’s going on.

But “pushing” issues is not good enough, by any reasonable standard. I want to know about results, and they don’t seem terribly impressive to me.

Many apologies, ejh.

I have perhaps run across too many un-ironic deployments of similar arguments to have recognised your intent. (And I was taken in by your perfect mimicry of such arguments’ tone and content)

I had also just finished writing a short rant about Atlas Shrugged, so the railway reference might have triggered some subconscious suppression of my irony detector….

I should perhaps have known better than to use irony on the internet.

In relation to one of the quotes in the OP, party and regional list systems are a joke. It’s a particular joke that somebody can actually be turned down by the electorate but then actually enter the European Parliament because the person who was above them in the list, and was elected, resigns their seat. (Declaration of interest: I know and do not like an individual who benefitted from this rule.)

To my mind the European Parliament and much enthusiasm for it has a lot of the paternalist approach about it – we’ll go off and decide what’s best for you and there’s not too much you can do about it. The persistent practice of holding second votes every time it doesn’t go the “right” way is particularly questionable and what its supporters never grasp is that in this way they get themselves and the European Parliament a certain reputation, for treating democracy just as a rubber-stamp process. It’s a pretty distant form of democracy and it seems to like it this way, and complaining that it’s maligned in the rightwing press, however true, is only half the story.

Note that this excellent line of argument is subject-independent: it can be used to sweep any of those inconvenient ‘fact’ things that one wishes to sweep, entirely out of the way, and the only way it can be countered is by bald assertion, until they invent time travel.

I’ve really been struck by how, for a lot of libertarians, the canon of aphorisms and just-so stories has stayed hermetically sealed from recent events. Because, you know, these are principles we’re talking about here.

Except for the ‘interference’ of a Royal Commission, in the case of Britain, to end something known as the ‘gauge war’ in the mid-nineteenth century.

And things didn’t always go that smoothly elsewhere either.