The Socialists who would regulate your happiness

The Australian reports:

Last weekend The Sydney Morning Herald splashed with a new survey that found 77 per cent of those polled believed that "a government's prime objective should be achieving the greatest happiness of the people, not the greatest wealth". This segued into a full-scale push for government to get involved in the happiness industry.

For analysis of the poll, the Herald drew upon Clive Hamilton's Australia Institute, a body devoted to whingeing about Australia's economic prosperity. Hamilton concluded that Australians are an unhappy lot and "we need a wholesale shift in the orientation of government away from a focus on the economy and towards national wellbeing".

Let's try to work out what these dulcet sounding words - wellbeing and happiness - mean. The Australia Institute points us to the Wellbeing Manifesto which assures us that Australians are unhappy with the values of the market - individualism, selfishness, materialism, competition - and pining for the nicer values of trust, self-restraint, mutual respect and generosity. Ergo, government must regulate a utopian world where we all have fulfilling work, but not for more than 35 hours a week, and live in cities with advertisement-free zones because "advertising makes us more materialistic".

Big government means the control over everything.