Society must mind morons

While I enjoy reading Iain Murray’s often very perceptive comments each week in Marketing Week, I can’t help thinking that he is troubled by some duplicitous thinking as his philosophy evolves through the medium of your pages.

On the one hand he seems to believe its acceptable to have regulations and controls over the “morons” and politically correct to limit their influence over the those who wish to avoid them in public places. On the other hand, however, he advocates no advice or controls over the “moron” DIY enthusiast who may inadvertently lop off a hand, or worse, in the pursuit of their hobby and thus, by implication, cost the tax payer thousands of pounds in NHS care to repair the damage.

You are right Iain, “in Britain no man is an island” as you have so eloquently put it and by the same logic we can’t refuse to withdraw our taxes to pay for the care of DIY morons or beef on the bone eaters, and so forth, because we feel that they should know better anyway. If they are morons, how can we be sure that they can personally be aware of the risk to themselves and, more importantly, the risk and cost their activities may have on other people?

I am all for the reducing “nanny state”, but in the absence of advice to morons, who can blame them for expecting nanny to take cake care of them when things go wrong?

Your commentaries assume that everyone should be intelligent enough to know better anyway, or if there are still morons in society, the intelligent and educated majority should be protected from them.

Alas, if only Britain were populated by intelligent thinkers like Iain Murray, what a better place this would be!

Tom Quigley

Chester le Street

Durham