I am going to have to find some new term to adequately describe the condition of ignorance that renders its sufferers unable to comprehend the inevitable truth that state-control means political control.
A shining example of this tragically far-too-common form of myopia can be found in one of today’s letters to the UK Times [note: link may not work for non-UK readers]:
Sir, Once again the NHS is set fair to become the filling in the Labour and Conservative policy sandwiches, and yet neither party recognises that the biggest problem besetting the service is the very political control each espouses.
Health, like broadcasting, is too important to be the political football of major parties during the first skirmishes of an impending general election. The NHS needs a charter, it needs sensitive management, it needs to value and cherish its long-suffering staff and, above all, it needs to be isolated from the political process.
The man who wrote this letter is a doctor and is, therefore, unlikely to be either dim-witted or uneducated. Yet, he passionately demands (and no doubt expects) a government-run health service that is somehow ‘isolated from the political process’.
I have penned a letter of response to the Times pointing out that the only way to get politics out of healthcare is to de-nationalise it and allow provision to be bought and sold on the free market. However, I do not expect the editors of the Times will be inclined to publicise such heretical and ‘extreme’ views.
Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s possible to wall off a nationalized industry from “high politics” – see for example what Gordon Brown did to the Bank Of England.
That doesn’t though mitigate its exposure to “low politics”. All rationed provision requires rulebound administrators.
It’s just a shame that no one has the political willpower to propose going about and privatising the NHS. When it does happen, as i’m convinced it eventually will – I don’t believe that there will be as much resistance to such a move, as some people would have us believe.
Just as long as the benefits are explained and the privatisation is handled in a careful manner, it should be incredibley beneficial to the population at large. With patients getting much better care, service and value for money. That is of course, as long as they don’t drown it in the same level of absurd bureaucracy and farce which has fallen on the railways.
Ironic that the letter was written by a doctor.
The NHS needs a charter, it needs sensitive management, it needs to value and cherish its long-suffering staff
You note that there is no mention of ‘Patients’, those long suffering souls who put up with being treated as ‘just another number’, by those ‘long suffering staff’.
The low morale is as much due to ‘prima donna’ Doctors and Consultants and low paid nursing staff, as to any political interference from Whitehall. I know of no other industry or profession, whose key workers would put up with such supposed bad treatment at the hands of manangement, and have so little to say or suggest to improve matters.
I have long suspected that the ‘consultantcy’ system, plays a large part in the in the poor performance of the NHS. While the same people who operate under the NHS umbrella, also have extensive private practices, then there will be a big difference in the quality between the two systems. It is in their interests to make it so….
That NHS training and facilities are used extensively to further the success of the ‘private’ sector, is another matter, and it is hard to imagine such a situation in any other sphere.
The phrase you are looking for is: ‘invincible ignorance’.
At risk of straying a degree or two off-topic, am I alone in wondering if this current British obsession with the NHS (or, indeed, health generally) isn’t err… pathological?
Surely a country which believes it has nothing more to worry about than health care is gazing rather too fixedly at its own navel?
I can think of half a dozen topics that strike me as being of far greater long-term significance to this country than who gets operated on at which hospital, by which doctor at what cost.
Truly, I think our priorities are getting very, very distorted if the Blairite Schools ‘n Hospitals agenda has become the only game in town.
“All politics is local.” This truism, hackneyed though it is, explains this phenomena….
The sham involved in trying make a State function apolitical merely sets up a State function who is not accountable to anyone. In effect the bureau is put above the reach, not only of the people, but the people who are supposed to represent them. In effect it becomes an institution responsilble to noone but itself. This is the most dangerous institution imaginable. Examples of such appeared as both practical communism and national socialism. The answer, of course, is to make a system which as mutually accountable, and that is through the market.
WAYYYY back when the Clinton’s proposed nationalizing health care in the US there was a phrase – Government Health Care – the bedside manner of the IRS, the service delivery of the Post Office, the budgetary restraint of the Pentagon.
The Post Office has since gotten better.
Bottom line – public funding has limits, limits imply rationing. Who gets to decide who’s Ox gets gored?
Pete – The bottom line in a private system. The rich get treatment; the poor don’t.
In order to get to a position where all healthcare is private the population must have attained a minimum level of affluence.
The problem is poverty and poor health go hand in hand.
Ernest Young commented “The low morale is as much due to ‘prima donna’ Doctors and Consultants and low paid nursing staff, as to any political interference from Whitehall. I know of no other industry or profession, whose key workers would put up with such supposed bad treatment at the hands of manangement, and have so little to say or suggest to improve matters.”
What do you suggest? They take industrial action?
The bottom line in a private system. The rich get treatment; the poor don’t.
The bottom LIE
Point taken, let me be more precise…
the rich get (high quality) treatment, the poor don’t get (high quality) treatment.
while ‘getting what you pay for’ based on an individuals ability to pay may mean they (are forced to) buy inferior services in their everyday transactions; inferior quality treatment could prove fatal, or reduce a persons functional ability. Decreased functional ability in many cases reduces a persons means to create wealth. Quite a viscious circle.
Sandy,
Yes the typical socialist reaction would be to take ‘industrial action’, but hopefully, in a more civilised society, and considering that we are speaking of a highly educated segment of our society, I would hope that sufficient intellectual pressure could be applied to effect a positive change in the prevailing conditions.
At present we hear very little from the medical profession suggesting just how procedures and waiting lists could be improved. Their very silence confirms their perfidy in supporting and running the present two competing and conflicting systems.
Sandy,
Yes that’s all perfectly correct. I mean, thank God for our National Shoe Service otherwise people on modest incomes would have no shoes to wear.
the rich get (high quality) treatment, the poor don’t get (high quality) treatment.
Yes? And the rich get high quality food and housing too, relatively speaking. Unless you’d like to discuss how they came by it, and if it was done legally, then we might be on to something. Otherwise, health care is like any other good or service, and should be traded for like any other. To infuse health care with some greater importance, and is is somehow subject to Command Economy constraints thereby, is wrong (IMO). The US is $7 trillion in debt, mostly do to righteous indignation of people who make entitlements out of some goods and services, and pay for it on credit. The day of reckoning is coming very soon.
This may be the intellectual pressure you referred to:
http://www.modern.nhs.uk/scripts/default.asp?site_id=48
And judging by some of your outdated prejudices, it may be time to re-appraise the fabric of the NHS in 2004. You may be surprised to see how customer focused and commercially aware NHS staff are:
http://www.nhsinnovationsnorth.org.uk/db/trtofreetext.asp?text=
Alternatively, ignore this reality and continue spouting an out of date mantra proposed by Nozick, Rand et al.
After the UK experience of privatisation in the postal service and the railways (service and safety actually deteriorated) then I’d be very wary of applying more (political) dogma to healthcare.
Sandy Heath writes:
“After the UK experience of privatisation in the postal service….”
Bzzzz! The postal sevice has not been privatised and remains crap. In fact it has got even worse, as the grip of the socialist unions has tightened.
Having kicked one leg out from your chair, let’s have a go at another. Perhaps you would like to tell us in what ways the old statist GPO telephone service was in any sense, shape or form better than (for all its faults) the privatised BT?
toolkein I kind of agree with that on some instances, but as with all things you can’t apply a hard a fast rule.
Apart from sympathising with those that ‘have’ to wait for for a heart by pass, I am often puzzled. These people are on death row, yet choose (buzzword) to wait (and maybe die in the process) rather than getting 0% credit card (I’m offered 10 every day) and paying the £10,000 fee (after all, what’s your life worth?) for a private op. Whereas the same people may think nothing of putting a £5,000 holiday on such a card each year. And the rest!
(There’s maybe a debate to be had on how credit distorts markets??)
In that respect health is like any other good or service – yes even like shoes. The distinction comes in when a persons lifelong care needs cost lets say £3 million for someone who needs daily nursing plus other medical care. They’re pretty expensive shoes and it becomes a moral rather than economic (it’s out of the question for most patients) decision.
Does society help people in such a situation? If so how do we fund it? I believe there must be some property redistribution as per Steiner’s model.
Sandy:
Out of curiousity, I visited the URL for the site you described as providing “intellectual pressure”
Here is a quote from it:
“Who we are: Modernisation Agency and Department of Health Pay Policy contacts
The Modernisation Agency’s Pay Modernisation Unit was set up to provide support and co-ordination to the Agenda for Change Early Implementer sites, subsequently identifying “best practice” in implementation of the new NHS pay system which would inform the rest of the NHS during rollout. We are a small team comprised of technical advisers (in job evaluation and the KSF, for example) and Best Practice facilitators. We have an office base in Leeds but live and work across the country. We work very closely with our colleagues in the Department of Health’s Pay Policy team. Their role is to continue working with representatives of NHS employers and the trades unions to address any concerns arising from the early implementation phase and to ensure an effective overall framework for delivering national roll-out, working closely with the Modernisation Agency and Strategic Health Authorities.”
Rigerous stuff. Nozick wouldn’t have stood a chance. I think I will abandon libertarianism right now.
Granted UK postal services, while still state owned, don’t operate as a monopoly and compete (badly) within a liberal market – not strictly privatised, but the argument you persue misses the point. Public v Private is an outdated argument.
Different models are appropriate for different sectors, and a dogmatic view that one approach is always superior to another strikes me as not being very practical.
Cydonia while trades unions exist you must agree that a body to facilitate agreement on pay issues is superior to industrial action?
I think it’s too simplistic to say “If nurses aren’t happy with their pay – go get another job.”
Sandy,
The Post Office remain in public hands and the railways were never privatised at all. They railways were, however, built and run by private enterprise up until 1945 when they were nationalised.
And, by the by, why are my ideas ‘dogma’ but your ideas are not?
Sandy Heath writes:
“Granted UK postal services, while still state owned, don’t operate as a monopoly and compete (badly) within a liberal market – not strictly privatised, but the argument you persue misses the point. Public v Private is an outdated argument.”
Indeed Royal Mail does operate as a monopoly on the services that bother most domestic and business consumers – and is extremely poor at it, so I’m afraid your original use of it as an example was a complete non sequitur.
As for whether private vs public is an “outdated argument”, I suppose that depends which part of the Will Hutton hymnbook you are singing from.
As far as I am concerned, the NHS is a very flawed system, so when I fall sick, I pay for my own treatment out of the money which, I don’t doubt, others prefer to spend on lengthy foreign holidays and widescreen TVs.
That, naturally, is their choice, but I fail to see why I should be expected to subsidise their leisure pursuits, because they refuse to pay for their own healthcare.
And, of course, there is a quite significant number of people who cannot (as distinct from will not) pay. Some form of safety net for them is desirable on both moral and cruelly pragmatic grounds, but why is it that you think a free market which sells shoes to the poor as well as the rich, could not cater for it perfectly adequately?
Sandy,
I have no out-dated prejudices, mine are all very much up-to-date, having been formed by recent first hand experience of your ‘up-dated’ NHS.
You may well have the best of intentions in formulating all sorts of wonderful management systems, but I can assure you, they are not working. All of your combined 1.3 million little hearts and souls may be wishing that it did work, but take it from someone at the ‘sharp end’, it is not. To think otherwise is pure solipsism.
You have replaced a somewhat old-fashioned, but never-the-less caring system, which managed to maintain some small degree of humanity, with a conveyor belt system that treats patients, ( just a reminder, these are the real people who are the clients of the NHS), with minimal consideration, if not as outright nuisances, who are to be manouevered and manipulated to suit the convenience of the ‘always to be revered’ medical staff.
The tale of the elderly patient, given an enema, and when the expected effect was felt, called the nurse for help to the bathroom, who told her ‘to hold on, I am on a break’. Quite humourous, if you were not personally involved, (visions of patients hopping around with tightly clenched buttocks), but quite barbaric if you were.
This and similar tales are all indicative of a less caring ethic and are perhaps, directly attributable to the new ‘portion-controlled’, style of management.
The most marked effect of your wonderful ‘customer focussed’ strategy seems to be a more dehumanised and disrespectful relationship between patient and staff. The portion control seems to be ten minutes of polite interest, (while they fill out the forms), followed by three or four hours of total disregard.
Does begin to sound a bit like the Post Office doesn’t it?…the ‘I’m in a different world, don’t bother me now’, attitude seems to be standard civil service issue.
Continued from above:
The problem might be summarised thus: Too much bureaucracy, too much vested interest, and too many sinecured positions. Far from increasing the staff by several hundreds of thousands each year:
http://www.publications.doh.gov.uk/public/work_workforce.htm
your precious managers should be cutting the fat, (should that be ‘pork’), from the system.
I was unaware that I was applying political dogma to the problem, I only speak as I find.
I would define dogma as repeating a belief system espoused by someone else and applying it to all situations. This could be “Nationalise everything” or “Privatise everything” based on such and such’s philosophy – I think both are equally impractical.
Those beliefs are not the important thing – I think the important thing is to find a business model that works – and that could be different in each sector.
GCooper stated: Some form of safety net for them is desirable on both moral and cruelly pragmatic grounds, but why is it that you think a free market which sells shoes to the poor as well as the rich, could not cater for it perfectly adequately?
Because for the market to operate there must be a potential for either profit or break even – this will never happen when you have so many people with a costly chronic illness (unless of course each person was extremely wealthy prior to getting ill).
ernest young’s unlikely tale
has nothing to do with systems or healthcare philosophies. It is as likely (more so in fact) to occur in the less regulated private nursing home environment than in the more tightly regulated NHS setting. If true it is a clear case of negligence and the person involved should be disciplined. However, whichever system it occured in should not be damned for the actions of one lousy member of staff.
Of course vested interest and bureaucracy should be stripped away. However rail privatisation / de-regulation in the UK shows that applying a dogmatic philosophy doesn’t necessarily achieve this.
Sorry Sandy but your reply is riddled with holes. That is not what dogma means. Try looking it up(Link). Your amoral and to be blunt irrational philosophy is called Utilitarianism. It is however quite dogmatic (as you seem to like the word ‘dogma’)… which is to say, an inflexible belief that is clung to regardless of how often it is falsified.
Rail ‘privatisation’ was a text book example of going from a socialist economic model (direct state ownership) to a fascist economic model (notional private ownership provided the ‘owners’ do what state regulators tell them to do). If you think that is a ‘market’ then I am not surprised you don’t think markets work very well.
Perry:
Sandy’s views are just standard Nulabor / Libdem stuff. There is not a whiff of principle or philosphy to be found there. To conflate them with utilitarianism is a slur on utilitarianism
Cydonia (a utilitarian libertarian)
Sandy,
Isn’t the whole idea of a National Health Service based on socialist dogma?
If the NHS had been modelled on a sensible business plan from day-one, then perhaps we would not have the incurable mess that now exists.
The very idea that a national health care system should be available to all and sundry, regardless. While being oh so! altruistic, is doomed to financial failure. No other country has ever tried to be all things to all men, and require at least, some sort of contributory or residential qualification. The treatment for all-comers idea was critisized from the inception of the NHS, but pure socialist dogma insisted otherwise.
The tale of the enema patient is perfectly true, and bears a lot more credibility than your tale of NHS staff becoming more ‘commercially aware, and customer concious’.
The old saying of : “None so blind, as those that will not see”, seems very appropriate in your case….
In that respect health is like any other good or service – yes even like shoes. The distinction comes in when a persons lifelong care needs cost lets say £3 million for someone who needs daily nursing plus other medical care. They’re pretty expensive shoes and it becomes a moral rather than economic (it’s out of the question for most patients) decision.
Well perhaps that’s where we part ways fundementally. The whole discussion of transfer by Force always is founded in ‘morality’. Unfortunately it is the morality of enforcer and not the morality of the producer. It is a fallacy to believe that morality must eminate from the State and that individuals cannot find it within themselves to act morally/ethically. We are not talking about someone intentially harming another person or property, we are talking about Forcing someone to sacrifice for another and to obliterate their value system in the process. Whenever the State interfers in individual courses of action, Force must be used, and there is a place for such Force, when a person harms another person or their property. It is immorally applied when State Force impounds one person’s property and gives it to another.
Also, your analysis does not include any statements about WHY the person finds themselves in poor health. The vast majority of the time it is do to their own behaviors and choices. Unless you advocate invading their households and locking the refrigerator or pointing a gun at them and Forcing them onto a treadmill, they will likely suffer from their own choices. But of course the do-gooders are setting about doing just that, further eclipsing liberty.
At the end of the day I am disinterested (In the legal and philosophical sense) in your emotional need to help people broadcastedly (i.e. without applying a specific set of values to a specific set of circumstances) and that is your right, and your trade, and you are welcome to it. You can dispose of resources directly to assist others and to convince others to do so voluntarily. But I will never support you advocacy of using State Force to compel anyone to do so through pain of consequence.
If this all seems fundemental and impractical all I can say is that it is merely the ramping up of the Statist mentality in the US and Europe over the last 100 years. I stand firm in my conviction that I will not be Forced to live my life as a sacrifice to anyone else. To have the essence of who I am confiscated by another whatever the flame of conviction that burns in their chest. My life is my own to live as I see fit as long as I honor other peoples right to life and property. If that is outdated then I am on a crash course with destiny and I doubt I will win.
As for the post office, if privitization is so bad, why does the Post Office lag so far behind UPS and Fedex who set the standards for getting packages across the the US (and now the world) in less than a day? Granted the purists point out that the Post Office has to worry about getting mail to the highest mountain tops, but perhaps that is where the market comes in. If it is not feasible to send a package/letter to the remotest locations cost effectively the market should apply and not coercively taking property to subsidize a persons ability to send a letter from Pike’s Peak.
“In that respect health is like any other good or service – yes even like shoes. The distinction comes in when a persons lifelong care needs cost lets say £3 million for someone who needs daily nursing plus other medical care. They’re pretty expensive shoes and it becomes a moral rather than economic (it’s out of the question for most patients) decision.”
Solution: health insurance.
“In that respect health is like any other good or service – yes even like shoes. The distinction comes in when a persons lifelong care needs cost lets say £3 million for someone who needs daily nursing plus other medical care. They’re pretty expensive shoes and it becomes a moral rather than economic (it’s out of the question for most patients) decision.”
Solution: health insurance.
why does the Post Office lag so far behind UPS and Fedex who set the standards for getting packages across the the US (and now the world) in less than a day?
Actually, that’s rather easy to answer. FedEx and UPS and all the others don’t have to deliver everywhere in the country/world for a single fixed fee. They get to choose which things they deliver to, for what and when.
I don’t think you’ll see FedEx and UPS (and TNT and all the others…) offering a similar service to the Post Office or Royal Mail because it makes utterly no sense. What they will do is package up deals to deliver stuff for banks etc… who have national deliveries on regular schedules which can be planned for – that’s something you can cost and make a profit on.
The difficult stuff is dealing with the birthday cards sending infrequently to odd places. Either everybody starts paying the true cost of delivery for these, which is an argument I am starting to come around to, or you continue to subsidise a national/international fixed rate for the ad-hoc letter.
Solution: health insurance.
What I’m unclear of is how to apply health insurance to what eventually will, from an actuarial perspective become an unisurable risk. Especially if you start to allow genetic screening of risk to protect the insurance company.
I’m not clear on how this will work for the elderly, most of whom eventually are going to need enormous amounts of resource, or people at high genetic risk of cancer, for example, women who have lost a mother, aunts and grandmothers to breast cancer.
Solution: health insurance.
What I’m unclear of is how to apply health insurance to what eventually will, from an actuarial perspective become an unisurable risk. Especially if you start to allow genetic screening of risk to protect the insurance company.
I’m not clear on how this will work for the elderly, most of whom eventually are going to need enormous amounts of resource, or people at high genetic risk of cancer, for example, women who have lost a mother, aunts and grandmothers to breast cancer.
And so the State should be the final subsidy? It is a certainty that people will die. Likely, many people will fall ill first. Technology is at a point that it can extend lives, but it is costly to do so, and people die regardless. The question is who receives what care and who should pay for it. It is likey that costs will outstrip an insurance companies ability to cover costs without premiums becoming too costly as well. But the answer should never be a Statist solution using Force to acquire the resources. Rather it should default to market forces. Staying healthy, mitigating illness, and dying are completely individual affairs. There may be voluntary sharing of risks up to a point if individuals choose to, but State Force should never be used. The reality is that insurance deals with sharing risks when risks are at hand, when something becomes a certainty, insurance becomes useless. But then some want to project beyond insurance and say that if it becomes useless, then it is a State matter, but I say it defaults back to an individual matter. Use of Force to mitigate one person’s situation with the property of another is tyranny in its most stark form.
When it finally sinks in that the State can no longer be the ‘carrier of last resort’, for everyone on the planet. (After all, the NHS is really just a socialist idea of insurance). Just what will be the answer – mandatory euthenasia at a predetermined age? with a State regulated life-style up to that point?
If this is to be, then why this desperate, and expensive urge to find the answer to old age. When people are younger, they want to live forever, but take a poll of a few octogenarians and you may be surprised at the answer to the question, ‘Do you want to live to a hundred?
Years ago people regarded extended old age as a curse, hence the many tales of men being condemned to living forever, in recompense for their sins.
The idea of living ‘for-ever’, is akin to the search for the Philosophers Stone, – just a dream, and like so many dreams, they should remain just that.
Yet another old saying: ‘Be careful what you ask for, you may actually get it.’
And so the State should be the final subsidy?
In these outlying cases? Yes, in my opinion.
I could not, in all conscience say anything else. Of course, that is a personal view. I have no real desire to live in a society which believed otherwise. And yes, this it is a problem for me to sqaure this with the concepts of personal liberty discussed here. However, I can’t see “perfect libertarianism” being any more pleasant than any other “perfect” system.
And so the State should be the final subsidy?
In these outlying cases? Yes, in my opinion.
I could not, in all conscience say anything else. Of course, that is a personal view. I have no real desire to live in a society which believed otherwise. And yes, this it is a problem for me to sqaure this with the concepts of personal liberty discussed here. However, I can’t see “perfect libertarianism” being any more pleasant than any other “perfect” system.
You have a right to your opinion. But when opinion becomes Force and it takes my life and my property, I will eventually fight back. As it stands now I (and my wife) have approximately 50% of my income taken in taxes (of all types and at all levels). And that does not include our portion of the national debt (US), which by my calculations is roughly what we have in net worth in savings/retirement accounts and our house. So it’s safe to conclude that more will be confiscated in the future. And when 75%+ of my property is confiscated because someone else can’t imagine any other way, and they will use the plodding, grinding Force of the State to attempt to obliterate me, I WILL fight back at some point. So your oblique sense of right and wrong, and the type of State you desire to live in does not reconcile with mine. Obviously there is a major conflict in idealogy and I am of the opinion that it will blow up at some point.
All I can say is that I wonder if you ever consider that a society can function without Forcing people to Care. You seem to be so convinced that the State, as some disembodied entity with a cornucopia horn at the ready, is the ONLY option to do GOOD. Caring will either exist through culture or it won’t. I have my preferences on how people should act and behave toward others, and I may take the opportunity to share my ideas. I make allocations from my resources in a manner consistent with my value system, and many times it is an exchange of the material for the immaterial, but it is based on my standard of right and wrong and no one else’s. I may bankrupt myself through sacrifice by choice, but I won’t be coerced into doing it. I demand to control what I create, and going so far, I think I have a moral obligation to see that which I create is disposed of in a manner consistent with what created it, namely MY value system. I happen to believe that there is immorality, and perhaps amorality, in Forced transfer systems. Morality is entrenched in value systems of individuals, and disappears in a State. A State cannot have a value system, it can merely take resources by Force. That perhaps is the root of the evil and amorality, so much resource and little or no true value attached with it. So, as I said before, purchase all the good feelings you choose with your money, but leave mine alone. I have no desire to be made a dependent on others as I am Forced to provide succor blindly and amorally.
So, again, you may see this as some unrealistic, fundementalist hogwash, but all I can do is point you to the pile of evidence of a society which is no better off with and with a mountain of debt as a result(speaking of the US, but the same applies to Western Europe as well). We have attempted to make more Good than is possible without crushing some segment under the boot of tyranny. Nations used to expand national Good by using Force on foreign shores. But that became passe. But did they stop? No. In fact Nations/States ramped up their efforts. And how did they accomplish all this Good? By confiscating the Money/Credit Market. But the debts will have to be paid at some point and boots will have to come back out (and perhaps puts some perspective on the Iraq situation – Warfare States and Welfare States are connected at the hip – I support the Iraq invasion as I have been presented a fait accompli by my government, resources and economic health are a collective issue when individual concerns are Forcibly made into collective issues too).
So if you can show me how the net human experience is manifestly better through advanced Statism, and show me that the huge debts Western nations have piled on themselves are of no concern, or at least are necessary because we are on the road to human perfection so its o.k., then I might listen. But the human condition is what it is, birth, life, pain, and death. Maybe one can get a few chuckles in before the end, and the abilty to do just that is what liberty is all about. Making the best out of a losing proposition. I refuse to have my ability to make the best out of life reduced because someone else believes they have the Master Plan, and can’t imagine a society which doesn’t choose to make it Public Policy.
Warfare/Welfare, pile up the debt. The State has one recourse that the individual does not – inflation!
When public debt gets too onerous, inflation is encouraged, thereby reducing the net value of the debt burden. Plus the population gets a temporary ‘feel good’ boost. Wages rise, but the intrinsic value of the extra cash diminishes, and so does the national indebtedness, the currency having also been devalued.
Unproductive government spending is the sole cause of inflation.
At the end of the day, any wealth that you may have accumulated in an honest lifetime, is in reality only lent to you by the State. One way or another they will manage to grab most of it back by the time you ‘pop your clogs’. Either by direct taxation, or the many other devious means they have of coercing you to spend your ‘wealth’.
The current low interest rates are a case in point, being directly at the expense of people’s savings, (even if you believe that inflation is as low as stated), and yes, the biggest savers are the older segment of the population.
How can you plan for your old age when you are forced to spend evermore of your hard-earned capital, just to survive, and with little chance of being able to replace it.
Toolkien,
You raise a lot of interesting points, which I’ll try to address…
…Obviously there is a major conflict in idealogy and I am of the opinion that it will blow up at some point.
I don’t believe it will myself. People will have to get used to less of a free ride, but I rather doubt it will go the whole thing in the other direction.
All I can say is that I wonder if you ever consider that a society can function without Forcing people to Care. …
In short, again, my opinion is no. A scoiety cannot function by relying on people to care about anything beyond their immediate social network. I suspect as a species it is the way we are hard wired and have evolved.
I’ve got to be brutally honest and say that I don’t much care about your plight or concerns or your wife about how much money the state is taking. Earn more if its a problem, that’s my way of dealing with a similar scenario. Sorry, if that sounds harsh, but I don’t know you, we will probably never meet and, for the time being at least, live an ocean apart.
Likewise, going back to how this thread started, health insurance. Do you care that my wife cannot easily get private health insurance because of the cancer risk? If I contact you personally to ask for help should she contract the disease, are you inclined to help? I can’t say, but I suspect the answer is probably no, as, after all you really don’t know me.
…But the human condition is what it is, birth, life, pain, and death. Maybe one can get a few chuckles in before the end, and the abilty to do just that is what liberty is all about. Making the best out of a losing proposition. I refuse to have my ability to make the best out of life reduced because someone else believes they have the Master Plan, and can’t imagine a society which doesn’t choose to make it Public Policy.
Wow. I thought I was a cynic.
Sure we make the best out of a losing proposition and along the way there should also be joy, happiness and a bunch of other stuff. Part of that is social interaction with your species. We’re not a solitary animal. We didn’t evolve as such, and I’m not sure we’re evolving into one.
Any interactions with others will ultimately impinge on personal liberty, likewise individuals will not be able, in a typically capitalist economy to gain the benefits that groups do. An individual will not get the health/car/other insurance deal that a large corporate/union/whatever will, it is simple economies of scale. A state might not be the best way to administer this, in fact it probably isn’t.
But for the time being I can’t think of a better way. Which means controlling the beast, reducing the size of the state and making sure that it is strictly limited in power. It isn’t going away, so I’d rather find ways to live with it on my terms.
Toolkien’s points struck a chord in me. The crux of the argument is that our money should be expended on our own choices. Not that of the state, not anybody else’s. Call it selfish, greedy, whatever.
Do the well-intentioned statists believe the worst of humanity that they think the only way to help the needy is to steal from the rich and throw money at the poor? Do they not believe that the common man has enough in his heart to help the needy of his own accord?
Apparently, they do not. Hence, the only way is to tax, tax, and tax some more.
TWG
Do the well-intentioned statists believe the worst of humanity that they think the only way to help the needy is to steal from the rich and throw money at the poor?
I can’t speak for anybody else, but that’s certainly not my view.
All I am pointing out that is individual Health Insurance in the modern world has severe limitations which don’t necessarily have anything to do with being poor or greedy.