If ever a policy belonged in a Monty Python sketch, this is it

I read an article in the Guardian about Westminster Council’s draft licensing policy that would restrict “vertical drinking” — standing at a bar to order a drink or chatting with a drink in hand. If ever a policy belonged in a Monty Python sketch, this is it. One can almost picture three men bursting into a crowded pub in brilliant cardinal uniforms shouting, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Put that pint down!” Considering all the issues facing Great Britain’s government, whether large or small, this seems to have become top of mind. To be fair, London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has pushed back against proposals of this sort.However, it does, as is often the case, bring us back to something far more significant than whether people may stand while enjoying a pint. It brings us back to the gradual erosion of individual freedom in the name of the common good. Utilitarianism, which judges public policy by the greatest perceived good for the greatest number, has a habit of eroding personal freedom, especially when combined with thoughtless calls to action.Public pressure after a tragedy or controversy often demands that government demonstrate it has acted. That expectation is understandable. Yet visible action is not always meaningful action. Too often, the response is another regulation, another registration, another license, or another restriction. Considered individually, each may seem reasonable. Collectively, they gradually redefine the relationship between the citizen and the state. The problem is not the desire to promote the common good. Every civilized society seeks that. The danger arises when “the common good” becomes the sole measure by which policy is judged. Individual liberty then ceases to be a principle and becomes merely another variable to be balanced against competing interests. Once freedom is viewed as something to be weighed rather than protected, each additional restriction becomes easier to justify.I was reminded of this close to home. There is a beautiful stretch of road where I live where a young woman pushing a stroller was killed, along with her baby, by two young men drag racing at more than 100 miles per hour. The city’s response was to reduce the speed limit from 45 mph to 35 mph. It was an empty gesture — an attempt to signal action by layering on a new rule rather than enforcing existing ones. Drivers willing to race at triple-digit speeds are unlikely to be deterred by a lower posted limit.It is much the same logic that requires me to obtain a shoreline fishing license simply to cast a line into the water. At my age, the license is free, but obtaining it still required working my way through a surprisingly counterintuitive government website. I paid no fee, took no test, and acquired no new privilege. I simply received permission to do something that was already lawful. One begins to wonder what perfectly ordinary activity will require permission next.At this rate, I expect the next draft policy will prohibit vertical drinking while vertical fishing.At best, bureaucrats create policies to satisfy the demands of understandably upset constituents. At worst, they enact them reflexively because they believe the highest good lies in regulating an increasingly unruly society. When this impulse takes over, the result is rarely greater safety, but almost always diminished individual liberty.CONVICTED FOR MURDER, PRAISED TERRORISTS — NOW TEACHING AT PENN?This instinct to quantify, document, and manage human behavior is hardly new — it is the core engine of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece, Brazil. During the film’s climactic fantasy sequence, the renegade repairman Harry Tuttle, played by Robert De Niro, is engulfed by a whirlwind of paperwork. The sheets briefly preserve the outline of his body before completely consuming him, leaving nothing behind but paper. It is one of cinema’s most memorable visual metaphors for bureaucracy: forms, files, and records become more important than the people they were created to serve. Tuttle’s disappearance beneath the paper symbolizes the erasure of the individual by an administrative system in which documentation has become more real, and ultimately more enduring, than the human person.Westminster’s proposal will almost certainly not determine the fate of Western liberty. Neither will a shoreline fishing license or a reduced speed limit. Considered individually, each appears almost trivial. Yet freedom is rarely surrendered through a single dramatic act. More often, it recedes beneath an accumulation of small, well-intentioned regulations, each defended as reasonable, each justified as serving the common good, until we gradually forget that ordinary life once required fewer permissions. Today’s exception becomes tomorrow’s rule.Andrew Moore is a small-business owner and author of the Primus Aeternus series.