More deaths from NHS neglect and the quango that let it happen

James Delingpole has written a great (and highly sarcastic) piece about the latest NHS deaths-by-neglect, and the failure of the CQC quango to even notice. He says quite ludidly: ‘if the NHS is the envy of the world, the world must be bonkers’. Here is one article about the original story. In brief, the Care Quality Commission, yet another public entity created by New Labour many years ago at UK taxpayer’s expense, wasn’t all that interested in care and quality, not enough to prevent the deaths of a thousand patients through neglect (and subsequently lying about the number of inspections it actually carried out).

Now, it would be all too easy to point the finger (yet again) at this atrocious socialist monster and at how it’s failed. I’m not going to use the deaths of innocent people just to make a rather obvious political point. But I want to reiterate two things:

1. Would this have happened in a private healthcare institution, or to re-phrase: is the NHS actually needed for the vast majority of people? I firmly say: no. The fact that the State has prevented this vital market from being left to evolve and grow naturally to a lucrative, efficient and safe one (just like…you know, almost every market which is left free), means that healthcare costs constantly rise (the opposite of what tends to happen in free markets), service and quality declines (the opposite of what tends to happen in free markets), rationing occurs and service becomes scarce (the opposite of…you know). Private healthcare is NOT so expensive because it’s meant for the rich, it’s expensive precisely because the government has consistently backed this loser and kept all but the most bespoke and expensive competition down. This beast is simply not allowed to fail. Like a race horse with two broken legs, the NHS doesn’t need a bandage, it needs a bullet between the eyes.

To answer my own question: would people ever be neglected in a private hospital? Of course I can’t say no. But would private hospitals and overseeing bodies get away with such gross neglect of their customers for so long, and then have their leaders retire on lucrative pensions? Just now, the government is debating whether to introduce criminal penalties for “reckless” bankers. But reckless heads of quangos are allowed to retire peacefully and rich. Why are the public not stamping up and down and threatening to boycott (somehow) funding the NHS? (It’s not the same thing, but council tax would be a good place to start.) When you think of the ridiculous (or non-existent) things some idiots in this country riot about, just when there is really good reason to cause a (peaceful) fuss and make our voices heard….nothing.

2. And this is the real point: no free-market supporter, no capitalist, would EVER claim that neglect would never happen in our system. No capitalist has ever claimed that our system would provide perfect cheap universal healthcare to everyone. No capitalist has ever made that famous promise of “no child left behind”. Why? Because those promises are unreal. No one can promise that, because the world simply doesn’t work that way. It’s like promising that it won’t get cold (actually that’s the sort of promise the Met Office would make), or promising clueless voters that under no circumstances can we allow this Bank Holiday to be blighted with rain. That’s because free-market supporters are in touch with reality. It’s called rationality. The world cannot be different just because you’d like it to be. (This is the single biggest reason why egalitarianism is evil.) Not even with a blank cheque and the nation’s funds behind you can this be done. The NHS fails, like socialism fails, because it simply cannot work. You cannot have a system based on supply and demand that doesn’t obey the laws of supply and demand.

But, as I said two years ago, after everything that has happened, after the evidence of history, after the countless deaths through neglect and malpractice under the NHS, after the pathetic waiting lists, the shoddy service, the terrible quality, bored unincentivised doctors and nurses, regulation after regulation, a national debt in the hundreds of millions, careless and evil commissions failing to do their job, and some more deaths, the Left will not be budged! It will still say: if we get rid of the NHS (or greatly reduce its scope) think of all the people who will die or not be able to afford healthcare.

And what exactly has your system given us?! See the NHS section of my A-Z links page; we are talking tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. Over the decades it’s probably a lot more than that. In the 21st century, old people are burning books in the back garden to keep warm because they can’t afford to pay the bills, or just dying in dirty hospitals. Babies are dying from neglect, but the Left still has the sheer bald-faced arrogance to blame private businesses and free markets for the world’s woes, and scream that we cannot possibly abandon “the envy of the world” and let our babies, mothers, fathers, friends, parents and the elderly alone to die. Err…and what exactly do they think is happening under their system now?! It’s like a Soviet commisar declaring that capitalism is evil because it cannot feed the starving people of the country. And that is why it is incredible arrogance, because none of these deaths ever, ever, makes the Left question its ideology, or even wonder if there is maybe some little flaw with its system. The answers it always proposes? More tax (of course), more regulation, more ‘reforms’, or another quango like the CQC.

In my opinion, most quangos are inherently open to inefficiency and corruption, incompetence and carelessness for three simple reasons: they are not directly answerable to their customers. They are not directly subject to the laws of supply and demand. They are financed by the State. I leave it to you to consider whether this maybe, in some tiny way, just might create a conflict of interest where objectivity is concerned.

tl;dr – the NHS yet again kills more people, a government quango yet again fails to spot it. National insurance will continue (and rise). The very thing that doesn’t exist and which will cure the healthcare industry, a free-market, will be avoided on the grounds that it can’t possibly care for everyone, everywhere, all the time, instantly and freely. And since socialised medicine can and does (!!) we cannot abandon it.

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The Ferengi – the ultimate strawmen of capitalism

You don’t have to have seen Star Trek or even like sci-fi to find this relevant. This isn’t just about bad writing, which is an artistic crime by itself – and when the very thing you’re trying to denounce is so obviously a ludicrous strawman not only do you fail to make the point, you end up undermining your own position. It’s also about propaganda.

I am a geek, I admit, so I can unapologetically say that if you’re not, I’ll do some quick back-story for you: the Ferengi are an alien race in the Star Trek universe, introduced way back in The Next Generation’s first season. Since the Federation (sort of like all the best parts of the United States in space; in Kirk’s words a place where people had “the full exercise of individual Rights” source) finally made friends with the classic bad guys the Klingons, the show needed a new nemesis for our heroes. Now, when you consider that even someone who hasn’t watched Star Trek probably knows who The Borg are, this should give you an idea of the impact a truly terrifying enemy can have…and how far off the mark the writers were with the Ferengi. They are ugly apish buffoons (the Ferengi, not the writers – though I don’t deny the similarity). After only a couple of episodes it was clear they couldn’t be taken seriously, so much so that almost every “Ferengi” episode of DS9 and Voyager to come was written as a “comedy episode”, with one exception.

The Ferengi were shown to be a technologically-advanced intelligent species (appearances to the contrary) who could rival the Federation in space exploration and/or conquest. As I said, this didn’t last long and they instead devolved into the ultra “capitalist” exploitative bigoted idiots that would crop up every now and then to beat us over the head with the “too much capitalism is bad!” mallet. I could attribute this to just bad writing, but the problem is that the Ferengi are a caricature of everything the Left believes about capitalism, beginning with a most profound and basic misunderstanding. Of course, it’s not the Left I’m addressing this to, but the everyday person who doesn’t know any better and whose only understanding of capitalism comes from false generalisations and clichéd movie villains.

Capitalism in one sentence

“Do not initiate force against an innocent rational being.” Got that? Good, because this is the basic premise of capitalism. Of course, people will disagree and they’re welcome to. You are welcome to define capitalism as you like, but you have to justify your definition and show how it’s logically derived. This is the job of philosophy, but I don’t intend to go into that much detail here. The best philosophical defender of capitalism was Ayn Rand and it’s her understanding of the term I’ll use. Even if you totally disagree with Ayn Rand, I don’t see how someone can object to me invoking her here. After all, when I attack communism and socialism, I don’t attack what I think they are, I attack what they actually claim to be! I am happy to take a socialist’s definition of their own system and roll with it, so no one should object to me using Rand’s definition of capitalism here.

Why does it matter? Well, the “profound and basic” misconception of capitalism that I alluded to is of capitalism saying “make money!” But it doesn’t. Don’t confuse an economic consequence with a political principle. I attack socialism, not because it says “surrender all your values to the State!” (although that is a logical consequence of socialism) but because it says “the Rights of the individual are secondary to the needs of the State.” I think capitalism has proven that wealth and profit are its corollaries (hard to argue with, even if you don’t like capitalism), but the political principle on which it stands is: “leave people alone”, or “don’t initiate force against others.”

We’ll see that every distasteful aspect of the Ferengi, who are supposedly the unavoidable consequences of rampant unchecked laissez-faire capitalism, are false and even precluded by capitalism.

Sexism

In Ferengi society females are treated like second class citizens. The men run everything and exclude Ferengi women on the grounds that they are useless in business, and all the Ferengi care about is profit. This is probably the biggest non-sequitor of them all. I don’t know how someone gets from “leave people alone” to “treat women like useless house-bound tools”. Capitalism’s principle of leaving every person free to pursue their own life, liberty and happiness surely encourages respect for our fellow creatures, recognising that they are just like us and have the same potential as we do. Also, with the use of force banned, how could women be forcibly restrained from having jobs and earning money? The Western world has proven (most memorably during WW2) that having half your entire population not sitting around doing nothing, increases production and profits. Imagine if today women were suddenly forbidden from working – almost every business where gender is irrelevant would collapse! Yet we’re supposed to believe that a society so obsessed with profit as the Ferengi wouldn’t take advantage of a worker base which could in theory double its workforce? Isn’t a common criticism of laissez-faire capitalism that would it end up employing too many people that it shouldn’t, not excluding them?

Of course, as any real life rational businessman knows, there is no profit in unnecessary discrimination.

You might say that this is just an example of an alien race which is ultra-capitalistic and also happens to be ultra-sexist. But every single aspect of the Ferengi revolves around profit, so the implication is clear that their horrifically-sexist society is connected to their capitalism. But even if it wasn’t, it’s guilt by association. For example, imagine if Trek gave us an alien race who are all black, oh and it just so happens they’re thieves and rape isn’t a crime on their world. Who would dismiss this as innocently exploring ethical issues in a science-fiction format and not racist?

Exploitation

The Ferengi are open to and encourage bribery, and forever force money from their customers by upping prices, lowering wages, and denying basic commodities to their employees, since without a regulation from some Progressive bureaucrat of course, this is what would obviously happen in all companies. Naturally, all unions are banned.

Leaving aside the government support that unions have had in the Western world (which only gives one side an unfair advantage in negotiations, but since that side isn’t the evil businessmen it’s ok), with the use of force banned, how could unions be prevented? They are an obvious and natural means for employees to pool their (economic) power and lobby their employer for change. If we drop the premise that businessmen are James Bond villains or irrational scrooges, it’s clear that no reasonable employer is going to lose his staff when by making acceptable changes (or losses) he can keep them here and happy. On the other hand, he isn’t going to needlessly cut into his profits if he doesn’t have to. And implying that this is necessarily a bad thing isn’t an attack on capitalism, it’s an attack on the very inescapable nature of human trade itself!

Also, it’s simply daft to assert that a businessman can keep upping his prices to extremes. Of course, in the heads of anti-capitalists, prices are set in a vacuum and buyers are at the whims of sellers. But prices reflect costs, overheads, the affluence of the customer base and competition. Yes, if there is little competition you can get away with upping your prices, but it doesn’t mean that, for example, if I’m the only pub within a 50 mile radius I can charge $20 for a pint of ale. No matter how rich my customer base is, no is going to pay that much for a pint. And even if a tiny minority could, would that handful keep my business running? If only 1 person a day buys a $20 pint, it does not follow that if I cut my prices to $2, I will now get 10 customers a day instead of 1; in reality I’d probably get many times that, because not only will more customers be attracted to my pub, they will each spend more because the prices are good. ‘Good’ here being within the context of my customers’ affluence; in some regions I could up my price to $3 and not lose customers. In other regions I’d have to drop it to $1.50 to (counter-intuitively) make profit. But to say that the customer is irrelevant and an unchecked businessman would just irrationally up his prices is pure fantasy. Which would be fine if this was just another alien race and not an unashamed caricature of a genuinely pro-human political system.

(Incidentally, in my experience pub managers and owners resent raising prices because it simply drives customers away, which means they lose the atmosphere in their premises and lose business. Ironically, the ever-increasing costs on alcohol are imposed by government taxes, something that wouldn’t exist in a truly capitalist society.)

Corruption

The Ferengi give and take bribes like we shake hands. This is bad, naturally, because the affairs of two private consensual individuals are of course the concern of the rest of society. Oh wait…

A bribe is a bribe if it’s a way to circumvent honest trade. For example, if you’re a buyer you could be bribed to accept some poor quality stock that you normally wouldn’t, and which your company wouldn’t normally want – but you get a brown paper envelope and press the Confirm button anyway. This is a bribe. Similarly, you could be a politician with the power to use force against your own civilians, and be bribed by a business to grant them special privileges. This is a bribe. (By the way, whilst the former could of course still happen under capitalism, the latter could not. Remind me again why the Left doesn’t like it?)

But saying that any private settlement reached between two free individuals is a bribe is just ridiculous. By this reasoning, any bargaining or negotiation at all should be viewed as a bribe. Offering to give someone a bit more for something you want isn’t a bribe, it’s called trade! But presumably this is frowned upon by the Soviet Federation of Planets because all transactions are the concern of the State.

It’s either fraud, in which case it’s illegal (even and especially under capitalism) or it’s not fraud in which case it’s no one else’s business.

Obsession with profit

Everything the Ferengi say and do revolves around profit. Their version of the bible is “The Rules of Acquisition” and even their afterlife myths involve a latinum-plated vault where treasures await them. How many businessmen do you know whose every topic of conversation concerns money? How many of them actually dream about it? How many of them see it as an end in itself?

Like everything else with the propaganda of the Left, it makes no sense. Anti-capitalists think that just because capitalists want to be left free to pursue their own selfish values, which includes making money, that “making money” is therefore all they care about. I’ve seen scarecrows with less straw than this argument. It’s like saying that just because someone thinks drugs should be legalised, his ulterior motive is getting high on anything he can get his hands on. I happen to think all drugs should be legalised, but if they were I wouldn’t take them. So why assume that someone who wants property rights fully respected automatically wants to stand on the necks of the poor to make some extra cash? It’s because the Left frames every anti-capitalist argument as a matter of money, and not the principles that political systems should be based on. It is here that anti-capitalists reveal that they are the ones obsessed with profit. But whereas the Ferengi are obsessed with having more money, the Left is obsessed with making sure no one has too much of it!

Greed

This ties in with the above: that just because capitalists want to be left free, which includes having no limit or checks on the profit they can acquire, they are “greedy”, an adjective related to excessive consumption. The difference is: rational people eat until they are full, because there is a logical and practical reason to eat and cease eating when that biological urge has been satisfied. The difference with money is, there is no logical or practical point in life at which it becomes pointless to acquire more money (especially since wealth isn’t finite, it’s created). Ok, in theory you might have so much money that literally nothing is an obstacle for you – but if your productive effort reaps money then the only way to stop making it, short of refusing to get paid, is to sit on your hands and watch TV for the rest of your life, a position itself that is contrary to human flourishing. Also, the incredibly rich do seem to be quite generous with their money in real life, a fact borne out by billionaire philanthropists and mega-corporations who are the largest contributors to charity in the world.

In fact, if greed is the irrational pursuit of objectives, then why would we assume that a person who continues working with no end in sight to what he can achieve or acquire is being irrational? We don’t see the best sports stars earn enough to live comfortably and then retire, do we? And we don’t criticise the likes of Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, Stephen Hendry and Lionel Messi for continuing to blow the opposition away even after achieving everything “reasonably” necessary in a career, do we? So why are businessmen with the same ruthless determination to win viewed as greedy? The best sports stars make  fortunes for themselves in exchange for a relatively limited return to their “customers”, the spectators. They smash the hopes and dreams of their rivals and seek to conquer everything and hope the other guy loses. Even assuming a businessman of equal ruthlessness, he at least brings a product to the world, not just a group of fans, and gives how many others a career and purpose along the way? And unlike a sportsman’s titles and records, the businessman’s practical achievements will live with humanity forever.

And yet, it is the charity worker which is held alongside the sportsman and businessman as the model of humanity.

Public welfare

Towards the end of the Ferengi story arc, which we see in the last season of Deep Space Nine, the leader of the Ferengi Alliance (though what he leads and how, in a system where government force is supposedly banned, is a mystery) has introduced taxation (pretty much a swear word to the Ferengi) and instituted various social reforms such as “free” healthcare and pensions. Ironically, a society where energy is free and unlimited and all matter can be “replicated” from thin air is probably the only one where socialism would actually work. But even then it wouldn’t, unless doctors and scientists could also be replicated…

Yes, the immoral Ferengi slowly begin to learn the true meaning of Christmas; that profit is a vice and the true calling of all sophisticated beings is of charity work to any potential number of other individuals they may never meet and might care nothing about.

But the funny thing is that despite the Ferengi being deliberately stacked as caricatures, they still manage to get things done! Throughout Trek, the Ferengi are never involved in any wars and their business interests are allowed to continue without interference from any aggressive power. They have an impressive military and aren’t slackers when it comes to exploration and invention. We are never shown the Ferengi homeworld in ruins, resource-deprived, impoverished or with people enslaved. In fact, in the words of Trek’s most famous Ferengi: “You’re overlooking something, Commander. Humans used to be a lot worse than Ferengi. Slavery, concentration camps, interstellar war; we have nothing in our past that approaches that kind of barbarism. You see? We’re nothing like you. We’re better.” And despite the Trek writers giving us the kind of alien history that we can only dream about, we’re still told “but if you want all this, you going to have to take corporatism and sexism too.” One can’t help but think that if ultra-capitalism produced a world without war, slavery and genocide, maybe it’s worth a few greedy businessmen.

I’m reminded of the Caldari society in Eve Online, which is supposedly a capitalist state taken to extremes; from Wikipedia: “the Caldari State is organised as a form of statist corporatocracy, where the State itself is owned by and operated on behalf of a few trust-like megaconglomerates.” Whilst I don’t deny that such a State could exist in theory, it isn’t capitalistic. Capitalism is the separation of corporation from State. The Caldari are contrasted with the Gallente, who “favour liberal economic policies, encourage individual entrepreneurship and social democracy, and maintain a progressive approach to social welfare”. The Gallente are very much like Trek’s Federation politically, but the problem is that these “virtues” are reeled off in one sentence as if they are mutually compatible or inevitable. They aren’t. Progressive social reforms are a hallmark of Leftist politics and are undeniably fascist in origin and nature. Individual entrepreneurship is antithetical to social welfare and liberal economics, since Liberalism in the modern sense means socialism, not capitalism. Again, we see strawmen in action: the best of all worlds is a semi-socialist “liberal” democracy and anything else must necessarily be an undesirable radical society which is either fully-despotic and totalitarian or ultra-capitalistic where the mega-corporations are in charge. How convenient. But I say again: this is all based on a simple misconception of capitalism. If capitalism is the society where nothing trumps individual Rights, then please tell me, how exactly could business own the State? How could despotism come about? How could anyone be forcibly included or excluded from any activity against their wish?

Why?

Because I’m so opinionated I can’t just leave it there and point out the flaws of anti-capitalism in just two popular works of fiction. The question is: why is capitalism painted this way? Leaving aside conspiracy theories of the Left (not because the Left is innocent but because not everyone who is sceptical of capitalism is always a Leftist), I’ll suggest this: it’s easy. If capitalism was understood properly it necessarily would exclude most of the nasty stuff that people don’t want to see in politics. The problem though is that it raises a lot of uncomfortable questions that people don’t want to answer, or simply can’t, like: what about education, roads, healthcare, tax? It’s easier to imagine that somehow our society just works with the balance of individual freedom and Statism, and pretend that the two are compatible or can even co-exist for a while, and anyone else must just have it wrong. And how much better does such a Liberal Progressive society look when contrasted to the strawmen alternatives?

The irony is that despite Roddenberry’s Marxist utopia, the United Federation of Planets was supposed to be the United States of America in space, a place where individual freedom was treasured and people of all races would work together, not because they are forced to, not because they are guilt-tripped into it, not because of positive discrimination or ethic-minority quotas, not because of political correctness, but simply because there is no rational reason for us to not cooperate if everyone is equal in the eyes of the law, and because there is no profit in discrimination. It was the capitalism of early America that smashed slavery and feudalism and allowed men to flourish (and get rich), and those countries that followed the example (like Britain in Europe) also succeeded compared to other nations. It was the Progressives of the late 19^th and 20^th centuries that would re-introduce the anti-individualist God-state as the political ideal, whether as expressed fascists, communists and socialists, whether as brazen as Hitler’s Nazi party or as nicey-nice as Barak Obama’s neo-socialism. Rather than being cutting edge thought-provoking television, Star Trek is just another example of anti-capitalist nonsensical clichés. We can blame it on bad writing, but the reason for such an obvious strawman in the first place is sadly more pervasive.

UK Government dictates ‘acceptable’ lifestyle to citizens

Story here.

Part of the government’s public health plan last year involves a ‘nudge theory’ which basically entails regulating acceptable practice and behaviour in the area of personal health and diet. This involves “physical activity, alcohol, health at work and food.” Committee chairman Baroness Neuberger said: “There are all manner of things that the government want us to do – lose weight, give up smoking, use the car less, give blood – but how can they get us to do them?”

Lindsey Davies, a professor and President of the UK Faculty of Public Health, another public sector organisation which UK citizens are forced to finance, said: “the public health profession has long argued that ‘nudging’ is but one aspect of a wide programme of interventions to help people make changes in their lives which promote good health and wellbeing.”

I wonder if the government would care as much for our health if it wasn’t paying for it, and doing so in such a shabby and fatal way? The answer, of course, is no. As opponents of the Left have pointed out time and again, when the government is supporting your life (either through benefits or healthcare) it will always feel justified in dictating to you how you should live it. After all, since the biggest claimers off government are those who contribute the least to it and land it in huge debt, government might think it’s only fair to start telling these people how much they can and can’t drink, smoke, run, eat etc.

The assumption openly accepted here, (and even by some posters on the article above) is that healthcare and lifestyle is a legitimate area of interest for the government. It is not. I’ll state this clearly: no one’s lifestyle choices or any part thereof, are a legitimate interest of government. The government should have absolutely nothing to do with your life or how you choose to live it. All it should do in your regard is punish criminals.

It is primarily because government supports the lives of so many citizens who are unwilling to work (those truly unable to work are a tiny minority), and thus has a vested interest in how we live our lives, that it feels the need – nay – right, to interfere in the private affairs of innocent citizens, by forcing them to label foods a particular way, banning certain foods from public use, heavily-taxing certain substances deemed unhealthy, offering incentives for healthy people and punishing non-compliers through fines or taxes. Just one example of this is the planned duty increase on high-strength alcohol. The reason? To encourage responsible drinking.

I am not making this up. This is real. This is actually happening now! This is happening in Britain in the year 2011. This is FASCISM. This is the government passing law after law, legislation after legislation, regulation after regulation, tax after tax – all under the guise of promoting one lifestyle over another. In essence, through the blatant use of force against which we have no power, the government has decided what the right and proper lifestyle is for its citizens. “This, this and this – is how you should live your life. This is what you should drink. This is what you should eat. Ok we might not be able to throw you in prison for it (yet), but we’ll just tax you more.” What’s the name for a higher financial levy demanded as a consequence for action? Fine. You are being fined by the government for choosing alcohol A over alcohol B; fast food X over fast food Y, tobacco 1 over no tobacco at all. This is happening right now – to you.

“But people who are unhealthy impose a greater cost on the taxpayer” – some object.

Firstly, don’t be so naive. If you truly believe the government has the best interests of individuals at heart, you live in a fantasy realm where politicians are our appointed protectors and guardians of liberty. Sadly, that is not the world we live in. We live in a world where politicians and their cronies gain power through votes and currying favour. A world where power itself is the objective of political parties, and our money is the means of acquiring it. Don’t ever take for granted that WE subsidise these creatures, whether we like it or not.

Secondly, if individuals were the object of concern for government, it would protect individual rights, and the most fundamental choice of all for a free person: how you choose to live your life.

Thirdly, it is true that unhealthy people impose a high cost on the taxpayer. But let’s break that sentence down: people who are reckless and careless with their own lives can make legally-enforced financial demands on those aren’t…and the problem with this is that these types simply don’t eat right?? Isn’t there a more heinous offence here, namely the sacrifice of the rational and productive to the lazy gluttonous slobs having their healthcare (and lives) paid for by…the rational and productive?! Is this justice? Is this fairness? No. But it is socialism. It is fascism.

What happened to your life being yours and my life being mine? Can I think for you? Can you act for me? What happened to being responsible for our actions? What happened to enjoying the rewards of healthy living and reaping the consequences of thoughtless bingeing? Were these just fairytales told to us as children, idealistic lies to keep us in check until we grew up and discovered that in the “real” world, we could eat, drink, smoke and abuse what we wanted because someone else would pay? To discover that if we ate right, drank in moderation (or not at all), and didn’t smoke or abuse drugs, that we would still be fined for the little eccentricities in life we enjoy (like, a pint of high-duty premium lager), and still have to pay for the wasters who chose poorly? To discover that if we couldn’t or (more likely) wouldn’t work, it didn’t matter – because there’d always be some sap out there, some loser, some “slave” to The Man in his silly office, “trapped” in the corporate system, having to do an 8-hour day, that would put food on our plate and keep the hospitals open whilst we watched TV in the armchair?

Or worse yet, discover that you needn’t burden yourself with silly things like principles and decisions. You have government: it will tell you what you can and can’t do and recommend what lifestyle you should pursue. Force will keep the dissenters in fear. Tax will keep the non-compliers in line. And all along, your government’s coffers grow – whilst the citizens’ savings shrink – and it will all be done in the name of public health.

Ayn Rand said “the difference between a welfare state and totalitarian state is a matter of time.” Every single fascist regime in history seeks to regulate the lifestyle of its citizens. It is the very definition of totalitarianism. The British government is fascist. Even if you can’t fight it (for now), you should not kid yourself of the nature of it.

Socialised medicine claims yet another innocent life

Just recently, I wrote about how the elected representatives and protectors of Britain are spending almost a billion pounds of their citizens’ money to vaccinate poor children. I also pointed out how such actions are not noble or philanthropic, but yet another futile demonstration of altruism at work: self-destructive sacrifice for others.

Only today I came across a shocking example of how true this is. Whilst the British government inoculates third world children with our money, in this country, in one of the supposed gems of the Western world, with the shining achievement of socialism: the NHS, a young woman dies from gross incompetence when a couple of simple injections would’ve saved her life. Link. Read this, and tell me that a paying customer in a private service would be treated to such pathetic negligence and arrogance. To those Lefties who think that capitalism’s flaw is that it leaves people behind, take a good look at your system. People are already being left behind. They are dying in the tens of thousands every year because a bumbling inefficient impractical politically-weighted system with grand aspirations of universal care (paid for by others) consistently fails.

This is the arrogance and evil of socialism: capitalism has never been given a fair crack at the whip, but in those isolated markets in those isolated times where it was allowed to partially flourish, it gave technology, advancements, jobs and commodities for steadily-decreasing costs (For a very few examples, I give you the industries of clothing, food, mobile phones, computers and the internet). Yet, the Left blames capitalism for all of its own failures, and consistently declares itself the only fair and moral system, “if only we could get it right”. Well guess what? No one has ever gotten socialism right. No other system has so consistently and spectacularly failed to deliver and been so antithetic to human rights, and yet been so blindly praised and lauded. Socialism is like a cult whose adherents’ faith grows as its failures mount up. It’s almost enough to make you believe that if Reverend Socialist promised a space-flight after drinking the “special potion”, the supermarkets would run out of bleach overnight. (Of course, the Left would blame capitalism for the shortage of bleach and demand a government allocation scheme to resolve the problem.)

Jo Dowling is the name of the woman who died, and she is one of many thousands every year whose lives are cut short because of an easily-preventable disease or illness. Where is your “no one left behind” now? I’m sure the vaccinated kids in Africa will be of great comfort to Jo’s friends and family, who talked with her over increasingly-distressing text messages right up to her death.

No capitalist claims that our system would take care of everyone. Instead, we realise that since healthcare and medicine are commodities provided by the property, service and innovation of other people, like any market of supply and demand, there can be no guarantee to these things. Yet socialism arrogantly declares, (and gets away with!) that it will take care of everyone, everywhere, for free! (Not free for those who make such schemes possible in the first place, however.)

It’s time we all declared that the Emperor is naked. The Cult of Socialism is a vile disease that should be talked about, exposed and overthrown. But it cannot be done on the grounds of altruism, on the morality of sacrifice. For capitalism to succeed, we must realise that the moral code behind socialism’s failure is the fault: altruism is self-destructive and there is nothing noble or “humanitarian” about it. The only objective basis for morality is rational egoism and self-interest, the philosophy of Ayn Rand.

Childcare benefits – robbing Peter to pay Paul

This news report made me want to comment on childcare expenses and government support. One mother says “I’d like to see more help from the government to reward people who want to work.” The problem with this is not just that the government isn’t a limitless bank account to give handouts to those in need, but that the government’s only source of real money comes from taxpayers; from people who do already work. How is the government donating more money to working parents with children “rewarding people who want to work” when that money will necessarily come from people who also are working and want to work, but don’t have children? In what universe does this pass as logical?

This is simply taking from non-parent workers and giving to parent workers. If this is “rewarding” working parents, then it is penalising non-parent workers. But why? And what business does the government have in “rewarding” any private citizen for their personal and family decisions? I already know the socialist answer that will be given: society has a vested interest in children; we have a duty, an obligation, an interest in “our” children, and that justifies passing on childcare costs to total strangers. Of course, like all socialist notions, this is pure nonsense. No one has an automatic vested interest in an unspecified undefined unlimited mass of potentials. If I have an automatic unchosen “interest” in other peoples’ children (any and all in the same country as me; no children in particular but all of them in general), and this interest must be realised by me paying for their living expenses, I necessarily cannot have an interest in deciding where my own money will go; my interests must be sacrificed to theirs on demand. And if you accept the principle that your own choices should be negated and your own property can and should be used to provide for other peoples’ children, you concede that what property and choices remain to you are entirely conditional and temporary, until another voice shouts and another group stamps their feet, petitioning government to dip into your earnings once again.

Look at the sheer number of charities that exist. Look at the extraordinary funds that are given in charity every year. Private citizens do not struggle to support causes that they consider worthy. But if they can’t, or won’t – that is not then a license to demand money, least of all by force (which is precisely what government power is.)

The facts are: parents are responsible for their own children, and no one is responsible for other peoples’ children; (the government should intervene in incidents of neglect and mistreatment). Hardly anyone actually disagrees with this, yet they still usually accept as a given that childcare should be part-financed by the state. But it is parents’ responsibility to decide whether or not to bring children into this world, and part of that consideration must be whether they can afford to. If hard times arise, one is always free to appeal to the goodwill and generosity of others. But to presume the non-existence of such goodwill and then compensate for this alleged lack of goodwill by demanding money for your children by force, is an ugly contradiction; it is one of the most bad-willed acts one could commit. How can one claim to care about the welfare of children (again, none in particular but all of them in general) yet not care for the rights of adults?

Another fact is that if it wasn’t for socialised healthcare, paper money, mass inflation, recession, ever-increasing taxation, ridiculous public sector spending and EU bailouts and fees, every single citizen would enjoy far more wealth and financial options; all living expenses would be dramatically eased, including childcare. It’s the government’s fault that times are so tough; do not mindlessly appeal to its excessive power to once again meddle in our private affairs. It has no business there. It should get out and stay out.