Samizdata

Stephen Pollard, a former member of Britain’s Young Conservatives who is now a New Labour guru, has an article in the Times called: My easy ride in the Senate seat.

Life after his easy ride is getting a little more tricky, with a savaging from Global Growth, the free-market NGO.

Leon Trotsky’s views on the role of arts were well known. He argued that art in all its forms existed to convey political messages to the masses and that any other use of the arts was bourgeois nonsense. The idea that it was acceptable for the arts exist to express the personal views of some artist or to simply ‘entertain’ in a non-political sense (not that anything is really non-political to a statist) was just preposterous to Trotsky. Thus if the state wished to advocate or depreciate something, it was the role of the arts to assist with that process. A modern day example of this would be, say, the relentless demonization of smoking.

Which brings us to the views of the Orwellian sounding Centre for Tobacco Control. This group of lobbyists is infuriated that their calls for smoking to be censored by the British Board of Film Classification (who were once simply known as the Film Censors) has been rejected.

The board’s cautious mention of smoking for the first time falls far short of demands that smoking scenes, particularly in any film likely to be seen by children, should be banned in Britain and consigned to the cutting room floor. Professor Gerard Hastings, director of cancer research at the UK’s Centre for Tobacco Control, said: “If the BBFC doesn’t accept its moral responsibility, it might as well pack up and go home.”

And so we discover that this lobby thinks is the ‘moral responsibility’ of the state to impose standards on entertainment to make them more in accordance with the wishes of our technocratic betters (them, of course). Not only do they wish to make it as difficult as possible for you to make your own non-coerced choices as to what stresses and chemicals you expose your body to, they wish to prevent you seeing images which do not conform to the message they wish to indoctrinate you with. I would be curious to know if Professor Hastings also supports forcing people to take favoured chemicals?

One of the unspoken benefits of globalisation is the use that professionals make of the new instruments and techniques that are publicised over the internet or through the wider dissemination of networks to newly emerging economies, such as India. However, as one example demonstrates, medical professionals in India read or learn about new developments from the West in their specialism but are unable to apply them because they are too expensive or the instruments cannot be imported or the patients are not rich enough to afford them. This is providing a spur to entrepreneurial and philanthropic activity.

Narayana Hrudayalaya is a medical foundation established in India by Mother Teresa’s cardiologist, Davi Prasad Shetty. Acknowledging the dilemma faced by all professionals in poorer countries, Shetty aimed to pioneer low-cost cardiac surgery that would prove affordable, with charitable supplements and insurance for even the Bengali peasantry and textile workers inhabiting the countryside around Kolkata.

In an interview with New Scientist, Shetty understood that governments and international bureaucracies were a hindrance, not a benefit.

If there is one organisation that can be squarely blamed it is the WHO. Headquartered in Geneva, separated from reality, it runs its global activities with help from government representatives who are mostly bureaucrats. In the countries I travel to, bureaucrats are a class of people who are experts in nothing but authorities on everything. They are not best-suited to guide planning at the WHO. One of the WHO declarations was “Health for all by 2000”. How can a global body make that kind of statement when a country like Zambia does not have an echo-Doppler, without which you cannot detect any heart problem, or when one cannot find a single functioning ECG machine in many African countries?

Apart from the WHO, I have stopped blaming the politicians and bureaucrats. We are better placed to bring about changes by being outsiders, not by being a part of the system. All that the government can do is to stop being an obstacle. If it decides to be a bystander, things will fall in place. My belief is that within ten years, the government healthcare systems in all Third World countries will fold up. The government will not be able to pay even salaries, never mind offering healthcare. In that situation, organisations like ours should come forward to take over and manage it in a professional manner.

Whilst Shetty describes himself as a social worker as a libertarian, he has recognised that governments cannot provide the resources to meet his objectives and that it is best if they stand aside or collapse. When the state is no longer a factor, the economics or healthcare starts to add up.

Yes, it’s very different. In Western hospitals, about 60 per cent of the revenue is spent on salaries, while in government hospitals in India, 90 per cent goes on salaries. By contrast, in our hospital only 12 to 13 per cent is spent on salaries. That doesn’t mean our doctors are being exploited. Since their output is ten times more, unit operating costs are very low. To earn a given salary in another hospital, a doctor would have to perform one operation a day. With us he might have to operate on five patients. We also work with zero inventory, so the burden lies with the supplier. And since we are the largest consumers of medical disposables, we procure them at a discount of 30 to 35 per cent.

Increasingly, for the pragmatists of the world, freedom provides the answers that the state is unable to.

As the unrelieved gloom surrounding freedom in the UK becomes too much to bear, here is a recommendation for all of those who wish to celebrate the diversity of snackdom before the health fascists force us all to eat lentils and turnips.

Visit snackspot and track down all of those arcane foods such as Gummi Zone Gummi Pizza before they are banned by the edict of Nanny Blair.

Last month a British panel of the Great and Good issued a thumpingly big report on the state of Britain’s pensions system covering both the private and state networks of provision. In short, the report said that we are living longer, have fewer children, and hence pensions systems which were constructed in the middle of the last century are buckling under the strain. It is all now a fairly familiar story and likely to prove one of the most ticklish political domestic issues in Europe and north America for the next few years.

But consider this – if we are living longer and able to live healthier lives for longer, and this is causing certain strains to emerge in pension provision, then how do the doomongers square that with the claim that we face all manner of threats to our health? One can barely open the pages of a newspaper or turn on the television without being regaled about all the horrible risks out there, obesity being the latest issue, but by no means the last.

Well, for all our supposed problems, something wonderful has happened to the health of most people in modern industrial nations these past few decades. (Clues: modern medicine, drugs, decline of heavy manual labour, greater awareness of healthy diet, dangers of tobacco, etc). I appreciate that stating such a thing in today’s culture of gloom is unfashionable, even reckless, but there it is.

Via Catallarchy, here is something you do not hear every day from a legislator:

Folks have got to take personal responsibility for their actions.

So said Michigan Representative David Palsrok, sponsor of a bill signed into law today in that state by Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm – a law which bans people suing food companies and restaurants for ‘making’ them fat.

And here is another quotation from the same article which is not quite as much of a shocker:

The Legislature and society should focus on preventing the sale of fatty, sugar-laden products in our nations [sic] schools or requiring that fast food manufacturers provide nutritional information on the food they sell.

Says who? The Michigan Trial Lawyers’ Association, of course.