Quite. The USA, Mexico and Canada have some kind of common market set-up going, but they don't start telling each other what tables and measures to use.

Taking the complimentary tangent: I don't oppose a European free-trade zone, but the bloated, corrupt superstate-in-embryo that is the EU is another matter. The sooner Britain leaves it the better.

First of all to get back to the capitalism gone wrong bit. No it's not it's capitalism doing what capitalism does. Sure capitalism isn't a perfect system and therefore checks and balances should be put in place to ensure the negative effects of capitalism are tempered. Yet saying it is "wrong" it like putting a 6 month old baby in a glass cage with a adult python which has been starved for 4 months and saying it's the fault of the python when it eats the baby! If you didn't want debt to become just another 'product' you shouldn't have put it in the cage with the starving python!

The comparison to the single currency is also extremely wonky as if we would even out the parameters a bit that would mean that all but 4 nations on this planet would have a single currency and that with the exception of Ireland every country in the EU would have had this single currency since way before 1920. Also a single currency means loss of control over monetary policy which certainly isn't the case with a single system of weights.

Same applies to Byron's comparison as yes The USA, Mexico and Canada indeed have some kind of common market set-up going in which they don't start telling each other what tables and measures to use. First of all seeing as the rest of the world uses the metric system any switch would be to the metric system. Which would mean that the USA would need to change which is 1/3rd of the partnership (and 68% of the entire population of the partnership) which would need to change.

So unless the UK comes close to 1/3rd of the EU, contains about 2/3rd of the entire EU population and acts like the USA in "international affairs" that comparison is pretty wonky.

I can see why losing control over monetary policy can be a problem for a country but not wanting to adopt the metric system just proves yet again that Britain is "an island" in more ways than one, which has more, and wants to have more, in common with the US than with its neighboring countries and largest trade partners.

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by Byron
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I reckon you guys have it better. America has an entrenched Bill of Rights whereas the UK relies on the feeble Human Rights Act....

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Problem I see is, a Bill of Rights (or any other written constitutional right) is only useful or protective if you have a government and leaders that believe in it and intend to abide by it--and a citizenry that makes sure that they do. The government we have in the U.S. now doesn't seem to believe in anything but it's own judgments, it's own ends, and the power it has to foist them on everyone else. If the Bill of Rights--or the Geneva Convention or anything else for that matter--gets in the way of what these people want to do, they will just ignore it. "Sorry, the rule just doesn't apply. Why? Cause we said so." And all in the name of "national security." Heaven help anyone who gets in their way--either within the U.S. or outside of it. Maybe I'm totally off base here, but I think if something in the Bill of Rights was seen as an obstacle to what they felt they needed to do, they'd find a way to suspend that right--and a way to justify it--for our own good. Hopefully, they wouldn't get away with it. But, I'm not quite sure they wouldn't--at least for a while.

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by Chambler
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...yes The USA, Mexico and Canada indeed have some kind of common market set-up going in which they don't start telling each other what tables and measures to use. First of all seeing as the rest of the world uses the metric system any switch would be to the metric system. Which would mean that the USA would need to change....

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You know, I've never understood the whole insistence on hanging onto the English system of measurement (what we call it) in the U.S. rather than going metric. Yes, some products are sold in metric units here. Yeah, they teach it in school. Sure, it's changing gradually--about as slowly as a glacier moves. Helps me out because I've grown up thinking in English units. But it's not as though we couldn't change if there was any will to do so. What IS up with that, when most of the rest of the world is using metric units? It really is bizarre.

The adoption of the metric system has indeed been a very very very slow process. Actually the US Congress authorized the use of the metric system and supplied each state with a set of standard metric weights and measures in 1866 and has been working on some form of metrification ever since.

Although it has also been a very slow process for the United Kingdom as it began its transition to the metric system in 1965 to more fully mesh its business and trade practices with those of the European Economic Community. As we all know what can happen is you mix metric & imperial measurement..... you crash another Mars Orbiter worth billions of dollars.

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by Chambler
First of all to get back to the capitalism gone wrong bit. No it's not it's capitalism doing what capitalism does.

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It's badly-regulated capitalism at work. As the saying goes, a totally free market doesn't stay free for very long.

We have governments to keep babies out of snake-infested boxes. (Where do you get these analogies from?! )

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Also a single currency means loss of control over monetary policy which certainly isn't the case with a single system of weights.

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Loss of the Imperial System entails the loss of cultural independence. The Imperial System had a lot of history behind it, and replacing it with cold, idealistic measurements destroys a link with our past. So what if they're quirky: people used them and were happy to use them. For centuries. Since they worked perfectly well, the change wasn't necessary. But a group of idealists decided it wasn't "rational" enough, and went ahead anyway. Change for change's sake.

The metric system was spread by the French Revolution and Mr Napoleon Bonaparte: indicative, perhaps, of the dangers of unwordly idealism.

A "little island" mentality is the sign of healthy indepence, and needn't be isolationist. I'd far rather have national soverignty than the bloated, lumbering cash-cow of the EU. Any organisation that can't even decide where it's capital should be is definitely a wrong'un!

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by Sandia
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Problem I see is, a Bill of Rights (or any other written constitutional right) is only useful or protective if you have a government and leaders that believe in it and intend to abide by it--and a citizenry that makes sure that they do.

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Surely a bill of rights presupposes government abuse? If the government voluntarily respected it, it would be redundant! The Founding Fathers, knurled old cynics that they were, certainly thought so.

They also took a low view of democracy. Thomas Jefferson said, "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." Again, if the people rose up whenever their rights were threatened, a bill of rights would be redundant. But they don't, because "the people" are often the first to demand civil liberties are curtailed. "The mob is the mother of tyrants," as Diogenes put it.

No, I believe a bill of rights exists for exactly these circumstances. The Bill of Rights is failing because the Supreme Court isn't implementing it. When the Court created a special category of "citizen enemy combatant", who had less rights than a normal criminal suspect, but more than a non-citizen "enemy combatant", Justice Scalia fumed that such a category was unconstitutional. They Court, he said, should order the man be immediately charged or released.

He was right. A bill of rights must impose absolute restraints on a government. The pitiful Human Rights Act, where all rights are conditional and must be "balanced" with other rights, is useless. (For all its flaws, the US system has protected jury trial, the right to silence, and the ban on double jeopardy, and the latest scandal about "warrantless wiretapping" wouldn't be an issue in the UK: governments have been bugging people without court orders for decades.) Public hysteria and political witch-hunts are inevitable, a cycle even, and we need a bill of rights to protect vulnerable people from the tyranny of governments and the idiocy of the mob. And, of course, to protect the mob from themselves.

I have only one thing to say on this subject! Custard

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by Byron
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Surely a bill of rights presupposes government abuse? If the government voluntarily respected it, it would be redundant! ....

....if the people rose up whenever their rights were threatened, a bill of rights would be redundant. But they don't, because "the people" are often the first to demand civil liberties are curtailed....

....A bill of rights must impose absolute restraints on a government....Public hysteria and political witch-hunts are inevitable, a cycle even, and we need a bill of rights to protect vulnerable people from the tyranny of governments and the idiocy of the mob. And, of course, to protect the mob from themselves.

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Sorry for chopping up your post this way, but I don't think we disagree on the basic point that a Bill of Rights is necessary to impose restraints on government.

I just think that it would be unwise of us to think that, just because we have rights written down in our Constitution, that their protection is assued. Yes, probably more secure than if they weren't written down. But I believe that, even with a Bill of Rights, you need a government that respects it and is willing to enforce it--or at least not try to sneakily do an end-run around it. When you have an executive, as we do now, that tries to chip away at those rights in the name of national security, a public that is so fearful that they are ready to give up certain rights for security, and a Congress that doesn't have the political courage to challenge the exective on its insistance on curtailing rights, the protections in a Bill of Rights can easily be whittled away bit by bit.

I'm not expressing it very well here because it's late and I'm tired, but I do see this danger in the US today, even with our constitutional guarantees.

Well Brown can't possibly be as bad as Blair, well unless he follows Bush into an idiotic war into Iran or Syria or some place else.