The mindset is the problem

Following on the heels of David Boaz, a US libertarian, our own Matt Ridley confides that 'There never was a golden age of freedom'. Well, stop press! No shit! Both of them appear to be applying the 'lump of labour' fallacy to freedom, apparently accepting that because many were and are not free, then a 'fair' distribution of freedom must mean a reduced amount for those who have 'too much'. Thus Ridley writes:

And as the bureaucratic monster invents ever more ingenious ways of telling me what I cannot do without asking it first, I too succumb to the temptation from time to time to wish I were back in a more free time. But that's because I make the mistake of thinking I would be in the elite in the past.

All the forms of legal servitude he mentions were abolished, by the elites, without creating a 'bureaucratic monster'. One would have expected a fine scientific mind to appreciate that the only correlation between old and new forms of oppression is the desire of some to lord it over others arbitrarily, and to arrange the law so that they may do so.

Get it clear, guys: unless severely checked from time to time, the natural inclination of the powerful is to perpetuate their power. Bureaucratic oligarchy is still oligarchy.