Having a half hour to kill before an appointment last night I chose to listen to BBC Radio 4's "The Moral Maze". Like most BBC programming this starts from the premise that we need the state to do something about something. The usual manipulative words were duly rolled out. "We" (the state) should be "concerned" (look for an opportunity to regulate) about something that "researchers" (taxpayer funded state action apologists) are "concerned about" (this should justify even more taxpayer funded research).

This particular episode was concerned with the "role of censorship". The usual arguments were trotted out and I guess the idea was to demonstrate with some of the BBC's most highly regarded intellectuals what a tough job the political class has with the intellectual shakings and stirrings involved in coming up with appropriate regulations. They showed that some people disapprove of pornography and violence in films and that others enjoy it or don't consider it to be harmeful. Others do consider it harmful and in fact dangerous. Oh what to do. What to do.

Of course the elephant in the room on the radio was the unquestioned assumption that "we" (the state) must do something about it. Now if this had been a conversation amongst free people who were not looking to impose their conclusions, should they come to any, on the rest of the population by threat of violence there could have been just as wide a range of opinions on the rightness and wrongness of the various issues and they could have each respected the others and gone with their own freely arrived at strategies of persuading other people about the virtues of their particular view of things. No need for a moral maze at all.

I have a great subject for them to debate though. How about "Why shouldn't the public be allowed to pay the BBC whatever they think it is worth?"