How oneupmanship wrecks things for everyone

‘There’s a little bit of a fascist in all of us. For some, the tragedy of human want may provoke an impatient urge to expropriate and centralise economic resources. Others, alarmed at the world’s exploding population, may be attracted by calls for a programme of mass compulsory sterilisation.

But for me it’s letter boxes and street numbering. I want order. I want consistency. I want standards. And I want eye-watering penalties for property owners who try their fellow Britons’ patience and waste our time by making their addresses impossible to find.’

You may remember reading this from Matthew Parris in last week’s Spectator. When delivering leaflets in Derbyshire, he was infuriated by the difficulty of matching houses to their address. A trivial point, you may have thought. Not so. In fact Matthew had uncovered two issues which preoccupy practitioners of evolutionary biology, game theory, political science and economics. These are libertarianism’s twin Achilles heels — where individual and collective interests diverge.