The Nanny and the Night Watchman The Conservative case for regulating freedom in a failed market

8 THE NANNY AND THE NIGHT WATCHMAN The Freedom to Gamble The battle between the bogeymen of Nanny and Night Watchman is the political context for today’s debate over the reform of gambling laws in the United Kingdom. [...] It is one of the ironies of history that Socialism, which gained influence by promising the substitution of the administration of things for the power over men, inevitably leads to an unbounded increase of the power exercised by men over other men… 26 THE NANNY AND THE NIGHT WATCHMAN From the replacement of the cottage weaver by the factory to the growth of the continuous process in steel producti. [...] This represents not the restriction of an essential commodity or resource, or the restraint of trade, but rather the constraint of something even more precious to the individual: their freedom, in the fullest sense of the word, through the manipulation of their decision- making capacities, the diminishing of their agency, the erosion of trust in the market, and the undermining of the value of mone. [...] This is the challenge facing the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States, and the Gambling Commission, the Information Commissioner’s Office, the Competition and Markets Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority in the United Kingdom, as well as the European Commission: how should different regulators also converge or diverge, both nationally an. [...] Only then can we hope to maintain the productive in the face of the speculative, preserve the collective in the face of the connected, and uphold the human in the face of the machine.