"Let us alone!"

Apropos of my earlier post on the Regulatory Responsibility Bill, here's a great story that would be worth retelling to someone on the Select Committee considering the bill. The story of a king and that king's adviser who asked industrialists what the king could do to make the kingdom wealthier: one legendary industrialist gave the only viable answer: "Let us alone!" Since the king's adviser only wanted to fatten them up before scalping them (he's famous for explaining that, “The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing”) that wasn't what he wanted to hear. But it was true.

It is a true story, and it's the origin of the term "laissez faire"--and it's a story these parliamentarians should be told loud and clear.