Forgive my attempt at latin, but I would like to pass comment on an editorial that bridges two apparently separate areas and mashing random latin words together seemed a nice way to begin. The theme, for the sake of clarity, is strategy.

I am a massive and unrepentant fan of Allister Heath, and not just because my name once appeared 12 pages behind his in the funny column. If you are not lucky enough to commute via a station where his editorial is handed out, along with a few other pages of news, on a daily basis then I suggest you follow his column online it is unremittingly sound and well written.

This morning he picked up two the topics I would like to follow up on. First is that finally some business people have begun to stand up to being targetted by people who, in increasingly literal terms, seem to want to eat them. The problem is that they are, as I am fond of saying every time this happens, arguing backwards. They are focused on the consequences for revenue, for jobs and for the economy and fail to address the underlying moral imperative that drives people to cry out that “something must be done” which usually means eating business people. They should be making, if only in part, the moral case that they earned and have a right to their profits and please don’t eat me. They forgot to say “how dare you” before saying “and it won’t work”.

Moving on Heath talks about the state-paternalist approach being taken to insurance and other products. The missing element here is the rest of the private sector. Instead of taking the capitalist system in the round he sets it up as a choice between caveat emptor and the regulator, ignoring the role that magazines, websites, and even newspapers could take of informing customers and arming them with data and data-processing tools. I believe that people would pay to get help like this, so this is certainly market-friendly. This omission really highlights the importance of starting from the moral position. Most customers actually want to be protected and see no problem with the state taking that paternalistic role, it is only the moral issue of forcing one favoured regulatory system on business owners and forcing tax payers to pay for it that presents a genuine problem. We should be saying “How dare you force a system on us, we would prefer a different one. Oh and it won’t work”.