We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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This, too Over the last month or so the Guardian has been running a series about the NHS. Here is a typical piece: That was the NHS: stories of hope, kindness and the human spirit.
Fair enough. But “the human spirit” is a god with many faces, and this, too, was the NHS:
Grandmother died of THIRST on an NHS ward ‘after nurse refused to give her a drink in case she wet the bed’
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I guess your country has never heard of a catheter.
now excuse me while I shovel an entire burger into my fat american yap.
That was a Scientology level of stupid.
What I love about the series is they miss the single biggest medical miracle (penicillin) and attribute improved survival rates to “Muh NHS”.
They cranked it off with a miserable old fart they wheel out as “the authentic voice” of any “bad old days” story now to describe terrible it was is sister died in a sanatorium for TB cases (pre antibiotics.
he clapping seals at h guardian lapped it up.
Looks like the Liverpool “care” pathway still remains in force 🙁
Not only penicillin but also the virtual elimination of TB (although it is still found in the UK amongst certain populations) with streptomycin (one the first people to benefit from it was none other than Bob Dole, and a vaccination programme, that would have been possible without an NHS.
I wonder why liberals, socialists, and progressives (all by any other name) in the US, living in their delusional world of “More free stuff”, always cite “Canada!”, and “Sweden!”, and NEVER “England!”
It their plaints for “National(ist)/Social(ist)” ANYTHING?
Can one still simply walk into the druggists and get Bicarbonate with analgesic and codeine, off the shelf, in the UK? (my favorite for hangover)
Quite so Natalie.
“I guess your country has never heard of a catheter.”
Heard of it, sure. But…
” The Old Man died (at home) the week his incontinence assessment commenced. The illness connected incontinence we’d been struggling to deal with for 6 weeks. The incontinence resulted in the bed sores & infection probably hastened his demise.
The first entry I made on it were: Fluids taken – nil. Urine passed – nil. He was already comatose.
I’ve just posted this over at Counting Cats:
That is hope, kindness and the human spirit at work. Not robbing people under the threat of imprisonment then spending the cash on employing more bureaucrats than medical staff. But apparently the former is some kind of national scandal while the latter is “the envy of the world”.
Does British law have the equivalent of “negligent homicide”? (Not a rhetorical question; I genuinely want to know.)
Kim,
In English Law, (Scots law greatly differs), manslaughter is a broad offence of unlawful killing without intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm.
One category is gross negiigence manslaughter, excerpt from the Crown Prosecution Service guidance below.
“I wonder why liberals, socialists, and progressives (all by any other name) in the US, living in their delusional world of ‘More free stuff’, always cite ‘Canada!’, and ‘Sweden!’, and NEVER ‘England!’ “
Some of them do cite England. And what’s worse, the Brits they know personally all assure them that the NHS is wonderful and any horror stories are either misreported or extremely unusual.
“… the Brits they know personally all assure them that the NHS is wonderful …”
BBC news often reveals unconsciously that the BBC gets almost all its political and social information about the US from “democratic operatives with bylines”. The same may be true in reverse: mainstream media in the US gets most of its information about the UK from beeboids and guardianistas (actually, that’s a bit tautological). There was a time in my youth when “the NHS is wonderful” was a phrase you heard on non-hard-left lips; The 1970s series “To the manor born” wittily puts “I’m told it’s wonderful” into the mouth of Audrey fforbes-Hamilton as she attempts to avoid having to rely on the NHS herself when in reduced circumstances. These days, you’re unlikely to hear it outside the bubble. Natalie owns an excellent book comparing the promises made by Aneurin Bevan and Labour colleagues when he introduced single-payer in 1948 with both the reality today and (even more interesting) what the promises made (and the promises not made) reveal about how healthcare already functioned in 1947. However the US have the much more recent promises of ObamaCare to compare with the reality – I doubt a book about the late forties can cure anyone not cured by that.
On BBC news, I recently witnessed what might be a partial exception to my opinion. BBC lunchtime news was perfectly timed to report Hillary’s scrape-a-win in Iowa. The BBC reporter on the spot in Des Moines commented on her winning of six successive coin tosses: “she should play the lottery”. What he was actually saying about her and about the Democratic party machine came across loud and clear.
(BBC lunchtime news is occasionally more straightforward than its evening news; I have sometimes wondered if the moral guardians at the BBC are not morning people and/or like to mull over what the line should be and apply it to the evening’s presentation. That said, I did not see the evening news. Usually, an on-the-spot report would be re-shown – maybe this one was shown then too.
The beeb often leaves one in slight doubt. As I type this, BBC red button news reports that a gang of asian immigrants who were making methamphetamine in bras have just been arrested in Australia: ‘It is one of the largest drug busts in the country’s history”: wit or accident? 🙂
Niall! *Ee-e-ewww!!!* 😉
@ Niall Kilmartin, who wrote:
‘The beeb often leaves one in slight doubt. As I type this, BBC red button news reports that a gang of asian immigrants who were making methamphetamine in bras have just been arrested in Australia: ‘It is one of the largest drug busts in the country’s history”: wit or accident?’
I think it’s wit. I occasionally hear similar bits of wordplay on the World Service broadcasts in the US. Sometimes, the announcer’s tone kind-of lets on that it’s a bit of a funny they dropped in there.
I sometimes propose to those who profess to adore the concept of the NHS a thought experiment that may be helpful – if you like the 1947 concept of the NHS, as Nye Bevan and his staff constructed it, you have to consider it in the social and economic context of the time. This means things like brutal financial austerity, rationing of food, fuel, clothing, conscription of young men into the coal mines as well as into military service, and all kinds of other restrictions on all kinds of public consumptions, from restaurant meals to newspapers. In some cases, rationing became more severe after the end of WW2 than it had been during the conflict itself, and rationing in the UK did not end until 1954. And throughout this period, draconian controls on currency and capital movement, combined with crippling taxation, essentially enslaved great parts of the population within the borders of the UK. That’s the social and financial context in which the NHS was set up and acquiesced-to by the people. There’s a certain reactionary insanity in concluding that people should accept it in the same form today, 70 years on and in an entirely different world. Add to that the fact that the NHS today – a vast, bureaucratic leviathan, a huge jobs-spending-and-patronage monster that does a bit of healthcare on the side – bears no relation to the ‘original’ NHS, which was essentially a socialization of a complete, existing system of private, for-profit, industry-based and charitable healthcare networks. Large parts of the pre-NHS system depended upon traditions of charitable giving, volunteer, underpaid and pro-bono work, privately-paid premiums, and all sorts of other mechanisms that the socialist NHS model exploited for as long as it could, but eventually either frittered away or abandoned in the quest for votes.
I don’t know what level of scandal it will take before the British public finally comes to see what a dreadful, murdering, stealing monster the NHS has become. The religious status it has attained in UK society may mean that there is simply nothing that the NHS could do that’s bad enough to make people lose their faith in it.
llater,
llamas
1) We’re all going to die.
2) Many of us are going to get sick, then die.
3) There’s no way around this.
4) There’s not perfect amalgamation of people that will prevent accidents, errors, and omissions – whether they be public, private, or a blur of the two.
5) Force never improves anything, and usually creates a net negative.
6) Let’s use the least amount of Force when constructing all of our institutions, including – if not especially – those relating to health.
7) If we use Force with reference to health care, some will certainly benefit more than they might have, some will break even, and many will suffer. AND we will have had the unleashing of Force on peaceful and productive people on top of it. Again, an overall net negative.
Unfortunately there are too many people who are willing to purchase as sense of doing Good, with Force, even though it creates a net negative because they are blind, or are purposefully ignorant, of the results.
That is the Evil that pervades among us in our everyday lives.
llamas, thanks for filling in a bit of the background on the post-war situation in Britain. I knew it wasn’t entirely roses, but I didn’t know that the rationing continued so late, nor that it was so bad there for so long.
JnC – although I was not there, the stories I have heard from those that were lead me to think that a lot of the austerity of post-war UK was a) partly self-inflicted, the result of equal parts of socialist economic illiteracy and British-is-best jingoism and b) a deliberate attempt to exploit the situation to punish political enemies and settle scores. Brutal taxation, what amounted to confiscation of private property, forced nationalization of major industries, and deliberate attempts to impose ‘proper’ Ingsoc behaviour on the population. The result, surprisingly enough, is that hundreds of thousands of the best and brightest Brits packed up and went to Canada, Australia and other outposts of Empire where the bovine stupidity of Socialist vengeance-based politics and hair-shirt imposition was not occurring. Funnily enough, Canada and Oz did very well, whereas the UK – not so much.
Not a lot of people know that the NHS came within weeks of collapse in the mid 1950s, and it was touch-and-go whether it would survive. Even then, the finances didn’t work. The situation was so dire that the government of the day secretly intervened to rig the outcome of a murder trial involving a GP – because if he had been convicted, UK doctors were likely to strike the NHS and bring it down. Google ‘John Bodkin Adams’ to read the whole story. Even then, the government was quite happy to paper over what was almost-certainly serial murder-for-profit to save their golden calf and buy votes.
llater,
llamas
llamas,
Don’t forget the other iniquity of 1950s Britain: the imposition of punitive (and I use the adjective advisedly) inheritance tax, which caused the demolition of countless country homes and impoverishment of the nobility. We could sit and debate the awfulness or otherwise of the nobility, but the inheritance tax was based on nothing other than class envy, and its manifestation was outright theft.
Also, let us not forget that the post-war U.S. loan of $8 billion made to Britain, which was not used for its intended purpose of rebuilding the Britain destroyed by the war, but for the nationalising of British industries. My father always commented that after visiting post-war Germany in the late 50s, the place had been rebuilt and was a hive of industry (he was an engineer by profession and visited the Ruhr every other year or so). In Britain during the same period, however, bombed-out buildings were still ubiquitous and strikes likewise. And while food rationing had been lifted by then, there were still astonishing shortages of essential foodstuffs (making rationing moot).
When PM Harold Macmillan said, “You’ve never had it so good!”, he was comparing 1960 Britain with 1950 Britain — a low bar for comparison indeed.
Thanks, llamas. The British “brain drain” was much discussed in the ’60’s, I do recall. I can also remember when Canada was considered a civilized place, not like the messy and violent U.S.,where the barbarians really don’t know how to behave. They are not genteel. Unfortunately Tommy Douglas got its throat in his fangs and the result was Medicare and then Single-Payer in Canada and, well, don’t get me started. At least Canada has Ezra Levant.
I will look up Mr. Adams. Sounds like one or two ethically-challenged docs that we’ve had over here recently.
Kim, if you value the continent and planet upon which you live, do not mention the words “inheritance tax” within a few billion light-years of me. Such a thing is a wretched abomination. And believe me, I have neither dog nor shekel in the fight. It is just so obviously WRONG. Property rights? What property rights?
Julie near Chicago
If you want an idea how insane Britans economics was take a gander at thei.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Former_nationalised_industries_of_the_United_Kingdom
Massive chunks of the countries production was amalgamated and “managed” to death by a cosy combination of Tory executives and labor apparatchiks. Theres far better lists and sites than wiki for the full info but that will give you a taste of pre-Thatcher Britain.
What everyone said.
Specific to Kim du Toit’s well-made point about inheritance taxes – while these were initially introduced after WW1, they were indeed wielded after WW2 as a naked weapon of class warfare. Soak the rich. The voters lapped it up.
I well recall in the 60s the screaming headlines whenever some ‘priceless national art treasure’ was scheduled to be sold abroad by its aristocratic owner. To pay death duties. In many cases, the owners wre simply held up at gunpoint by the government of the day – forbidden to sell their own property to the highest bidder, forced to turn it over to the state at a valuation to satisfy the taxman. This was a matter of deliberate policy by governments of both parties. Huge agricultural holdings were broken up and sold off piecemeal in a process which would have made Mugabe proud – maybe that’s where he got the idea from. And all that accumulated wealth p*ssed away on the usual ways that governments waste money.
There were still bombed-out sites in inner London in the 1960s. For all I know, they may be there still.
llater,
llamas
Not a lot of people know that the NHS came within weeks of collapse in the mid 1950s,
It’s been within weeks of collapse ever since it started. It was within days of collapse last week.
Truly whoever puts a bullet to the NHS will be doing the UK as great a favour as Richard Brandon.
Oh, and taxation in the UK is higher now than it was in ’52. Didn’t have a VAT back then.
And a long list of ‘Never‘ events from the NHS has been published, e.g. removing an entire testicle instead of just a cyst.
With respect to llamas the JBA trial was a little more complicated than stated.
Mr Justice Devlin took, I think, two days to sum up the evidence and the doctor was put away for misuse of narcotics.
I agree he probably did addict his elderly patients and obtained their assets fraudulently but I can’t agree that there was a cover up.
I emigrated in 1968 and wrote to the Times naively pointing out that if doctors continued to emigrate the NHS would have to import overseas docs to replace them.
Mr Ed,
Little has changed. In medicine the price of survival is eternal vigilance on the part of the physician and an always questioning patient.
Doctors are potentially dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. Hospitals even more so.
I always told the patient to ask about the down side of treatment, if they recovered they were lucky.
I think Vlotaire said that the practise of medicine was to keep the patient amused until nature made them better.