I wasn't going to start this for ages but then I saw "Too Much Schooling?" by Digby Anderson. "In government, nothing succeeds like failure" as he says.

Seems that cannabis grown by the Canadian government isn't up to snuff. The terminally-ill recipients are not entirely satisfied:

Ingrates.

Hat tip: Commonsense and Wonder.

This really ought to be like shooting fish in a barrel. Anyway, I am going to start keeping a list of NHS disasters. Here we go:

Briton's dash from Spain beat mother's ambulance to hospital 10 miles away

Wasn't sure I'd ever come across anything on this but John Hudock, of Common Sense and Wonder has. He says:

Here is an article on one the real legacy of Rachel Carson. If there were any honesty in public discourse she would be regarded as the primary cause of one of the greatest human tragedies in the 20th century instead of a great environmental icon.

UPDATE. And Hudock has another go at it here.

The R101 was an airship. In 1931 it crashed on its maiden flight killing most of those on board - including the Secretary of State for Air and several other notables.

Now, I had thought the story went along these lines: both the private sector and the state sector were, at the same time, in the business of building an airship. The R100, the private sector airship (worked on by, amongst others, Barnes Wallis and Neville Shute - yes, that Neville Shute) worked perfectly. The state airship, the R101, obviously didn't and after the crash, rather than admit that it wasn't up to the job, the state banned production of all airships.

Not quite. According to this what actually happened was that the state sponsored the building of two airships: one by the state and one by the private sector. And when the R101 crashed, it scrapped the whole project - largely on cost grounds.

OK, so not quite the state failure I had thought it was but it was still a state failure. While the example of the R101 might not demonstrate the superiority of the free market, it does demonstrate the superiority of private enterprise. It also another example of a state projects ending up in expensive and embarassing failure. A sort of Concorde of the 1930s, if you will.

I had thought that the Osbourne Judgement was the judgement that legalized strikes - or at least, meant that strikers couldn't be sacked - and hence saddled the United Kingdom with 70 years of industrial unrest. But, reading this essay, it would appear that that is not the case.

What I meant (or at least what I thought I meant) was the Taff Vale Judgement. But it seems I was wrong there too.

So what was the Osbourne Judgement then? The Osbourne Judgement was the ruling that (at the time) made it illegal for trade unions to make donations to political parties. Now, you might well think that bankrupting the Labour party was a good thing, but this would be wrong. What a society does with its money is entirely a matter for it and its members. What Osbourne (the trade union member who brought the case) should have done (assuming it was a possibility) was to have left the society.

As it happens the Osbourne Judgement was a "bad thing" but not, perhaps, the sort of monumental state failure I am looking for. So #1 on the list needs replacing. Damn, how embarassing.

I suppose I could always replace it with the Soviet Union.

Actually, I never got to 100 in the first place. But never mind here's a few more nominations along with their proposers:

100. Scottish Water - Andrew Wood
     
101. Scottish Parliament - Andrew Wood
     
102. Hearth Tax - Jackie D
     
103. State-produced cannabis - added 21/9/03

I am sure I read about this somewhere but my understanding is that in the decade before the fall of the Soviet Union one of the main causes of death - aside, that is, from exploding nuclear power stations, exploding fuel pipelines etc, was exploding televisions.

The TV factory had a quota to fill and the costs of failing to fill the quota far exceeding the costs of killing the poor bastards who would have to use them. Meanwhile, the absence of a free press kept unwary Russian TV viewers, well, unwary.

At least I think that's what happened...

Unless you know different.

Over recent days I have got involved in an argument with Iain Coleman, of Mr Happy?, over at Conservative Commentary. He believes that the state has the power to do good and cites the example of a rough sleepers initiative that he has been involved in, which has been, according to him, successful.

I thought it was rather strange that he chose as his example a case that none of the rest of us know anything about... because if he had chosen an example that some of the rest of us do know something about, well, he might have got a rather bumpier ride. After all, I thought, there are huge numbers of state failures and started to compile a list. And here it is:

1. Osbourne Judgement
2. Window Tax
3. R101
4. California Electricity Regulation
5. Prices and incomes policies
6. Currency controls
7. Concorde
8. British Leyland
9. British Steel
10. British Airways
11. British Coal
12. British Telecom
13. British Gas
14. British rail nationalisation
15. British rail fragmentation
16. Dutch rail fragmentation
17. Linwood
18. Unleaded petrol
19. CFC ban
20. DDT ban
21. Bank of England
22. Concentration camps
23. Extermination camps
24. National Lard Council
25. State education
26. National Health Service
27. Japanese Bullet trains
28. Dangerous Dogs Act
29. Royal Mail
30. Comprehensive schools
31. Nationalised examinations
32. Gas regulation
33. Russian collectivisation of agriculture
34. Cultural Revolution
35. North Korea
36. Cambodia
37. Import controls
38. Drug War
39. Elizabethan monopolies
40. Londonderry Plantation
41. Council housing
42. Town planning
43. High-rise council housing
44. Cigarette warnings
45. US Witholding Tax
46. Interstate Commerce Commission
47. Belgium
48. Gulags
49. University funding
50. The Dome
51. British movies of recent times
52. Sunday closing
53. Race relations industry
54. National debt
55. SA80
56. Great Leap Forward
57. Eurofighter
58. EU budget
59. Common Agriculture Policy
60. Common Fisheries Policy
61. Gold plating
62. Decimalisation
63. Metrication
64. Sheep dips (organo-phosphate style)
65. Ground Nut Scheme
66. Savings and Loans disaster
67. State pension
68. London Underground
69. Portuguese rent control
70. National Theatre
71. Bull Ring
72. Milton Keynes
73. Green Belt
74. Planning/Zoning
75. Building regulation
76. Tobacco advertising bans
77. Gun bans
78. Knife bans
79. Mace bans
80. Jitney bans
81. Double decker-with-roofs bans
82. ERTMS
83. The Hatfield crash aftermath
84. German labour laws
85. Legal tender
86. Pub licencing laws
87. British Shipbuilders
88. British Rail Modernisation
89. BBC
90. Marriage
91. Exploding Russian televisions
92. The Hungry Forties
93. Speenhamland system
94. Amtrak
95. Roads
96. Nationalised self-defence
97. Health and Safety Executive
98. Trabant cars
99. 1952 London Smog

Update 09/05/04

It seems that someone doesn't like my list and is threatening to give me a throughly good fisking. Promises, promises.