Roger Kimball looks at Britain's pending 20-mph speed limit, and observes,

In Britain, as in the United States, "local authorities" like nothing better than sticking their collective noses into the everyday life of ordinary citizens, chivvying them with ever more intrusive rules and regulations, backed up by the coercive power of the state.

But give them time.

In Berkeley, 81% of the voters approved an ordinance which is being implemented with a massive home invasion scheme I discussed yesterday.

In Britain (as Kimball points out) the ruling bureaucrats are invoking "safety" -- an argument we've all heard countless times in countless forms.

"If we can only save one life..."

"If we can save one child!"

With the global warming meme now factored in, there's now a new argument.

"This is the only way to save the planet!"

I'm not sure whether the people who fall for this stuff deserve contempt or pity, but one of the downsides of democracy is that when they acheive majority status, they can trample on everyone else's rights in the most unnatural and inhuman ways. Like surveillance cameras; Kimball mentions " The Road to Big Brother: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society" (to which Glenn Reynolds wrote the introduction), which I've been reading. What worries me is that the bureaucratic rulers (and their activist handmaidens) are running an ongoing operation which is relentless and has as its primary goal the total destruction of personal freedom. They don't stop with whiny pronouncements; these lead to laws and regulations, which then lead to fiendish enforcement ideas. Like red light cameras, government-mandated GPS snooping, more surveillance cameras, and on the heels of the type of home energy "analyses" they've planned for Berkeley will be Big Brother intrusions into what people do inside their once-sacrosanct households.

"None of your business," you think?

Try saying that when the meddlers meddle.

Canadian libertarian Pierre Lemieux bravely did just that when he was asked prying personal questions about his love life on a government form, and (as Mark Steyn relates) he immediately lost his gun permit. Steyn argues that free men should stand up to such tyranny, but he recognizes that the consequences can be too severe for most people:

The proper response of free men to the trivial but degrading impositions of the state is to answer as Pierre Lemieux did. But it requires a kind of 24/7 tenacity few can muster - and the machinery of bureaucracy barely pauses to scoff: In an age of mass communication and computer records, the screen blips for the merest nano-second, and your gun rights disappear. The remorseless, incremental annexation of "individual existence" by technologically all-pervasive micro-regulation is a profound threat to free peoples. But do we have the will to resist it?

I worry that the larger the Nanny surveillance state gets, the more we will all live in glass houses. (Double-paned, of course, to save the planet!) Those who demonstrate the willingness to resist will be regarded with contempt by the good citizens (a process explained here), and as fools by those who obey resentfully in the hope that they'll just be left alone.

After all, if we are lucky and do as we are told, we might be allowed to drive our GPS-monitored cars at 20 MPH, only on certain days of the week, while mobile cameras film our every movement.

(Yeah, the innocent have nothing to fear, and all that....)