100. Scottish Water
101. Scottish Parliament

The trouble is, Patrick, that each item should have a link embedded in it where you can read the full story.

Market failure, peut-etre?

If the government had been in charge of CrozierVision, this omission would surely not have occurred.

So, Brian, you want me to burn the midnight oil backing up my case, eh? Presumably you'd also have me reading stuff and looking up references.

Oh the Tyranny of the Facts!

I chose that particular example for two reasons. One was that I happened to be reading the report on it at the time, so all the details were handy. The other was that Mr Cuthbertson's, um, impassioned essay contained this particularly virile section:

Handouts to the homeless are a sign of a decent society, they will tell you. But morality for such people is a totally collectivised concept. If a good cause exists, it should be funded by the state, not rely on the charity of individuals. If any person or country deserves help, it should again be government which does it. Individual morality doesn't come into it, and it cannot.

I had hoped, by citing our own homelessness strategy which is firmly based on working with private charitable and voluntary groups, to convince him that he was factually wrong on this point. Sadly, there are no signs that this happened.

Successful as our homelessness strategy is, I'm keen to improve it further. If anyone has any ideas that they think might be useful, I'd be grateful if they dropped me an email.

Iain,

You are wrong. You may, on occasion, have brought up the example of your project to refute something that Peter Cuthbertson wrote but you also brought it up in an attempt to refute what I wrote. What follows, in case you'd forgotten, is an extract from a comment you wrote (you start by quoting my words):

The second thing that strikes me is: how likely is the state to succeed even on its own terms? The state seems to be pretty unsuccesful at achieving anything else (whether it be running an effective railway or law and order). It seems at best unlikely that it will succeed here.

Let's take an example I mentioned earlier: the homelessness strategy in Cambridge...

Anyway, nothing in what you wrote alters the suspicion that you believe that the state has the power to do good.

Patrick,

Fair point. The specific point about homelessness, in relation to what you were saying in that debate, is that the issue highlights the inadequacy of the libertarian account of freedom.

Anyway, it's manifestly obvious that the state has the power to do good, insofar as there are state activities which achieve good ends. Organising a universal garbage collection system, for example. Now, you might think that a non-state solution would be better in some particular case, but that's a point you have to make in detail, on a case-by-case basis.

I'm not interested in having the state doing things just for the sake of it. If there's another, better solution to a particular problem, great. Show it to me. In detail. Don't just wave a rolled-up newspaper and shout "Bad state! Bad state!" That's not serious politics.