I grew up queer in Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland. Bjelke-Petersen was populist, racist, and religious: he hated socialism, but the Queensland of my youth also had Australia’s only free hospitals. You couldn’t get an abortion in one of them, though – that necessitated a quick trip south of the border, into New South Wales.

Queensland was not a good place to be queer. My most enduring memory from that time does not, however, involve the police beating people up in gay bars or booking Aborigines for driving while black. It involves being told – earnestly, sincerely, and at length – by various conservative Christians that God had sent AIDS into the world ‘to clean out the shit’. It was a force for good, would save queers from themselves, and maybe even win some over to Christ. ‘AIDS,’ they told me, ‘is the plumber’s friend of God: pump, pump, pump!’

Conversations like these – although awful enough to make me glad of the closet in which I was hiding at the time – were also illuminating. I needed saving from myself. And, because I spread disease, other people needed saving from me.

A great deal of public policy these days is predicated on saving people from themselves, for their own good and the good of others. And it needs to stop, in large part because it springs from the same place as the belief that AIDS is the plumber’s friend of God. I realised the extent of this when I read Chris Berg’s Liberty, Equality, and Democracy. I have never before seen the case against laws enacted ‘for our own good’ put with such wit and grace.

At the core of Berg’s book is this: if we persist in thinking people cannot make simple decisions about what to eat or when to drink, why then do we think they can do something as complex as choosing between different political visions?

Berg takes particular aim at rule by experts. Perhaps the best bit is his account of how those who purport to have superior knowledge are susceptible to exactly the same sort of cognitive biases and systemic errors as the rest of us. Likewise, just because individuals make poor decisions, that does not mean governments make better ones. There is abundant evidence they generally don’t, and because governments are so large, their bad decisions have far more dramatic, expensive, and destructive consequences.

Helen Darville book review in this weeks spectator