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.
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So George ‘Hitler’ Bush and his shadowy cabal of extreme right-wing neo-conservative warmongers are, once again, showing their contempt for the peace-loving, democratic will of the international community:
The United States is challenging a strategy by the World Health Organization (WHO) to tackle obesity.
Some scientists accuse President Bush’s administration of planning to water down proposed junk food regulations, in order to protect big business.
No mention of who these ‘scientists’ are, mind. Perhaps they are Indyscientists.
Anyway, I support the WHO. I think it is only reasonable and fair that I should be told what I can and cannot eat by a panel of experts from Libya, Chad, Cuba and North Korea. It’s for my own good!
I learned long ago not to hang my rhetorical hat on anything as unreliable and insubstantial as a scientific report, especially when they are described as ‘surveys’. It always conjures up visions of earnest researchers scurrying about with clipboards asking random people multiple-choice questions about household detergents.
However, that said, it would not surprise me in the least to discover that this does, in fact, have some substance to it:
Millions of Africans believed to have HIV/Aids are free of the disease, according to research published yesterday.
The survey will dismay those who claim the West is ignoring a pandemic so acute it could wipe out the populations of entire African states.
I know exactly who those ‘dismayed’ people are. They are the lobbyists, charity scammers, tranzi office-holders, preachy celebrities and other assorted NGO-fodder who have turned AIDS into an international fund-raising and foreign junkett circus. Joining them will be a host of African kleptocrats who know only too well that ‘AIDS’ is the magic word with which to open the purse-strings of Western treasuries.
Africa still has that ‘dark continent’ quality about it that makes it impenetrably mysterious to gringos in the West. So when we are told by talking heads with august-sounding titles that squinty million zillion trillion people are dying of AIDS in Africa every four minutes, very few of us (if any) have sufficient knowledge of the situation on the ground to raise so much as a batsqueak of doubt. By the same token, it would all look the same if the figure-compilers lumped in deaths from all manner of other maladies and diseases in order to inflate the victim-toll.
I remember so clearly when AIDS became a big public health issue in Britain in the mid-80’s. From out of nowhere came legions of ‘experts’ to assure us that it really was the new ‘Black Death’ and it was poised to wipe out the civilised world. Resistance was futile. Most of us would be dead before breakfast.
It never happened in the West and maybe it is never going to happen in Africa either.
With a rapidity which defies belief, Mr Bezos, of Amazon.com, has delivered to my grasping hand Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s The Myth of National Defense, and a copy of Ludwig von Mises’ Bureaucracy, direct from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, via standard shipping, in less than a week. Remarkable.
I thought I’d warm myself up for the big one, from Herr Hoppe, with the 1944 classic from Herr Von Mises. And what a true classic it is. I’m only on page 19, of its one hundred and thirty four pages, but already it has staggered me with its guillotine-sharp language, its brutal power, and its Germanic eloquence. Magnificent.
We simply are unworthy of this greatest of the twentieth century’s bearers of the flame of liberty.
One quote has already caught my eye, after a recent David Carr article:
It [modern socialism] is totalitarian in the strict sense of the term. It holds the individual in tight rein from the womb to the tomb. At every instant of his life the ‘comrade’ is bound to obey implicitly the orders issued by the supreme authority. The State is both his guardian and his employer. The State determines his work, his diet, and his pleasures. The State tells him what to think and what to believe in.
→ Continue reading: Gorge yourself stupid
It is now 2004 and may I take this opportunity of wishing all Samizdata readers a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.
As for me, I have resolved that I will be in the same bad mood this year that I was in last year. It makes perfect sense. My enemies don’t change their ways, so why should I change mine?
It is time to stand up for the “nanny state” – for Jowell and Hodge and, in other areas, Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman. And also, in general, for the state’s right and duty to involve itself in questions of diet, health, family budgets and good parenting.
So it turns out that all the leftie carping about ‘big food’ in 2003 wasn’t a joke after all. They really mean it. I predict, before the end of 2004, a ‘burger tax’.
The crucial point which critics of the nanny state fail to mention is that individuals and families don’t stand alone. None of us lives in a neutral social space, unharassed, and free to make wise long-term choices. Whatever the philosophical ideal, in the real world we are bombarded by corporate messages cajoling us and our children to consume and borrow. We are inhabitants of the more, now, spend-it, eat-it society, which – let us not forget – boosts the profits of the multinationals.
We are also inhabitants of ban it, tax it, regulate it society which – let us not forget – boosts the profits of the political classes.
Health-hectoring is now being added to enviromentalism and ‘anti-racism’ as a legitimating ideology of the ruling class. Another self-sustaining justification for their power, wealth and status. Nothing new about that of course, only now they are prepared to put the whole process on public display before nailing it into place.
Alright, I wrote that quotation myself. But anyway, this is what I hate about the Guardian: it’s so damned gloomy (what I hate about the Telegraph of course, is the stair-lift adverts). Can anyone tell me exactly how the Guardian manages to publish this…
Newly revised predictions from the Government’s Actuary Department (GAD) reveal that the life expectancy for men who will be born in 2031 has risen to 81 years, compared with 75.9 years for those born in 2002. For women the figure jumps to 84.9 years, compared with 80.5 years for those born last year.
And now the bad news. The figures are around one and a half years higher than the GAD had assumed as recently as its last report in 2001, and will fuel further fears about the ability of future governments to cope with the profound problems associated with an ageing population.
…on the same day as this…
The full scale of the health timebomb caused by Britain’s descent into lazy lifestyles is to be exposed in a landmark report by the Government’s Chief Medical Officer.
Sir Liam Donaldson will spell out for the first time how two-thirds of Britons are now so inactive – with most people, particularly women, failing to do even the minimum recommended amount of ‘moderate’ exercise – that they are at risk of getting cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
I don’t know which is more shocking and dreadful, the fact that Brits are living longer or the fact that they take no notice of government fitness targets! Did you all get your fitness targets in the post? No? That’s strange, neither did I.
→ Continue reading: “Britons have longer, nicer lives” disaster!
It annoys the hell out of me when I hear the chattering classes in Britain describe this country’s decrepit socialist National Health System as ‘the envy of the world’… and it astounds me when idiots in the USA think it should be emulated over there.
As someone who has all too much first hand contact with the NHS, as well as having been at the tender mercy of other nation’s healthcare systems when I have broken bones, crashed cars, got shot, fallen through a weak floor, head-butted a flying bottle, been bitten by snakes/dogs/rats/, skied into trees, caught exotic unpronounceable tropical diseases and all the other things that happen to folks such as myself who travel to far off places and foolishly venture out of the hotel… and I can assure you that the NHS is at its best nothing special compared to much of the rest of the world and at its worst, it absolutely sucks. I certainly never saw a dirty ward in a hospital in Croatia or Ghana or the USA like those I have seen in Britain’s state run hospitals.
In reality, not only does the NHS provide indifferent care (an appointment I needed once took 11 months to arrange), it does so at vast cost and in reality a large chunk of the burden of healthcare is done privately. In fact, the NHS could not survive without a large healthcare private sector, the size of which Eamonn Butler points out over on the Adam Smith Institute’s own blog.
When my grandfather was gravely injured a few years ago, the treatment he received from the NHS was adequate – but after it became apparent that he was not able to look after himself any more due to brain damage, my family ended up shelling out well over £40,000 ($70,000) per year to keep him in a private nursing home which did not smell of piss. I am not complaining, after all what the hell is money for if not for something like that? However the role played by the non-state sector is a largely unsung one and I wish more people in Britain realised that the fact the state does not provide a healthcare service does not mean one will not be provided. If the state did not take such a whack of tax money to fund the monstrosity that is the NHS, far more people would have healthcare insurance.
Of course that might not end up costing much less than the existing system but the evidence outside Britain suggests it would certainly produce a higher quality system than the one of de facto healthcare rationing in use in the UK now.
The British Medical Association cuts to the chase. No shilly-shallying about. None of these namby-pamby half-measures or pathetic, milquetoast compromises, no, they have decided to go for the kill and demand another full-blown drug war:
Smoking should be completely banned in the UK, according to a top medical journal.
The Lancet said tens of thousands of lives would be saved by making tobacco an illegal substance and possession of cigarettes a crime.
Might as well really. The political climate is right, the enforcement apparatus is all in place and resistance will not be futile because it will be non-existant. In fact, they are probably kicking themselves for not coming out with this sooner.
Dr James said the government had already shown it was willing to pass similar legislation, such as banning the use of hand held mobile phones while driving.
Once again we see that appeasement does not work. Give the bullies an inch and next they want a mile. These people cannot be placated.
Forest director Simon Clark said the Lancet was “the true voice of the rabid anti-smoking zealot”.
He said smokers should not be treated as criminals, adding: “The health fascists are on the march.
Oh no, Simon, they have been on the march for decades. Now they have taken the citadel.
“What next? Will they urge the government to ban fatty foods and dairy products?”
Yes. There is no reason for them not to.
Empathy is the thing in schools history these days. You get the kids to think their way in to what it was really, truly like to be a fourteenth century Bohemian swineherd and feel their pain. Empathising with groups neglected and derided by the “Kings ‘N’ Battles” school of history is particularly favoured.
As part of my personal commitment to this school of thought, I’d like to bring up for public view the sufferings of a marginalised and stigmatised group. Slaveowners. Ever thought about their problems, huh? You probably think a person who can legally demand the unlimited services of another human has everything he wants. But you’d be wrong.
The ancient and modern chroniclers agree. Slaves were frequently lazy, dishonest and obstructive. Lacking initiative and zeal. Endlessly prone to saying, “yes massa, coming massa,” and yet still somehow unwilling to put their hearts, souls and scrubbing arms into bringing out that deep-clean sparkle when scrubbing out the vomitorium.
Here is Seneca, writing in the Rome of the first century AD: “A household of slaves requires dressing and feeding; a crowd of ravenous creatures have to have their bellies filled, clothing has to be bought, thieving hands have to be watched, and the service we get is rendered with resentment and curses.” (From On Tranquillity.)
Seneca knew no other system than slavery. In contrast English observers of the US writing after 1833 could observe the system from outside. I found several quotations in the Penguin Portable Victorian Reader illustrating how shoddy slave-work was. A passionate enemy of slavery, Charles Dickens, wrote “Richmond is a prettily situated town; but like other towns in slave districts (as the planters themselves admit) has an aspect of decay and gloom which to an unaccustomed eye is most distressing.”
Even an opponent of slavery as lukewarm as William Makepeace Thackeray had to admit, writing to a friend in England: “Every person I have talked to here about it deplores it and owns that it is the most costly domestic machinery ever devised. In a house where four servants would do with us …. there must be a dozen blacks here, and the work is not well done.”
→ Continue reading: Life is still tough for the owners of lazy slaves.
Melanie Phillips links to and comments extensively on this article about NHS nursing by Harriet Sergeant from last Saturday’s Telegraph, which flags up a publication also by Sergeant from the Centre for Policy Studies, entitled Managing Not To Manage (.pdf only). That’s about the management of the entire NHS, and not just the nurses, but the bit of the Telegraph article that particularly caught my attention concerns the way that the education of nurses is now heading:
The training of nurses has promoted them further and further away from the interests of their patients. In the late 1980s, nursing turned itself into an academic profession. Nurses desiring increased status and greater parity with doctors sought to transform their training into a graduate profession. The result is “a frigging mess”, according to a member of the King’s Fund, a charitable foundation concerned with health.
One senior staff nurse at a hospital in the West Country, who teaches at the local university, pointed out – logically enough – that the academic status of the qualification means “there has to be a lot of theory”. But there is too much theory, too much emphasis on social policy and communication skills – and not enough practical work.
At a London A&E department, a staff nurse who had recently qualified complained to me that her training had not prepared her at all. In 18 months of study, she had spent only one and a half hours learning how to take blood pressure and a patient’s temperature. On the other hand, a whole afternoon had been devoted to poverty in Russia. …
The usual assumption is that if there is a problem, it will take money to put it right, but that enough money will do it. But training nurses who knew how to nurse didn’t take any more money than teaching them about poverty in Russia costs now, surely. The problem will be forcing through the decision to teach nurses well instead of badly. My answer would be to phase out the NHS – gradually, no rush, say over a period of, I don’t know, three months – and thus allow a world to re-emerge in which good nurses get paid far more money than bad ones.
Melanie Phillips blames feminism. But why does feminism only seem to do damage to public sector institutions?
First, they came for the tobacco.
With the ‘junk food’ demonisation campaign in full swing, now is the time for our heroic public officials to do their stuff:
All foods – including fast food and snacks – should carry clear warnings about their calorie content, MPs suggested on Thursday.
Top executives from McDonalds, Cadbury Schweppes, PepsiCo UK and Kelloggs faced questions from the House of Commons Health Select Committee.
Obesity levels are soaring in the UK, but the firms said they did not believe that this was their fault.
The Food Standards Agency has described the problem as a “ticking timebomb”.
Well, they would, wouldn’t they. If food were not a problem then we would not need a ‘Food Standards Agency’ and then we would all be on our way to hell in a handcart (and we all need a handcart because we will simply be too obese to walk there).
This Court of Inquisition is merely Step 2. Step 3 is a choice of either legislative force or ‘voluntary code of conduct’. Step 4 is another public campaign (disseminated by a reliably compliant media) because Step 3 ‘is not working’.
Then on to Step 5: the levying of ‘sin taxes’ on hamburgers to ‘encourage a change of behaviour’. The money raised then pays for a lot more Food Standards Agents.
There it is. Step-by-step. Simple when you know how.
We are all in the wrong business.
Thomas Sowell has an excellent column today laying out in lucid terms the economic ignorance behind current proposals to reform health care in the US.
An OECD study shows that the percentage of patients waiting more than 4 months for elective surgery in English-speaking countries is in single digits only in the United States, where we “lack” the “benefits” of a government-run medical system. In Canada 27 percent of patients wait more than 4 months and in Britain 38 percent. Elective surgery includes some heart surgery.
Shortages where the government sets prices have been common in countries around the world, for centuries on end, whether these shortages have taken the form of waiting lists, black markets, or other ways of coping with the fact that what people demand at an artificially low price exceeds what other people will supply at such prices.
. . . .
Americans, who produce a wholly disproportionate share of the world’s new life-saving drugs, are being asked to imitate price control policies in countries where such policies have dried up the costly research behind such discoveries.
. . . .
Politicians who claim to be able to “bring down the cost of health care” are talking about bringing down the prices charged. But prices are not costs. Prices are what pay for costs.
No matter how much lower the government sets the prices paid to doctors, hospitals, or pharmaceutical drug manufacturers, none of this reduces the costs in the slightest.
Evidently, most of our policymakers and “thought leaders” are so gobsmackingly stupid that they cannot retain elementary economics and history in their pointy heads, and by all accounts honestly believe such gibberish as “price controls lower costs.”
No matter how many times socialistic policies crash and burn, no matter how many times market-based systems beat the pants off of top-down autocratically controlled systems, the “liberal” elites in government, academia, and the media in the US return time and time again to shopworn socialist prescriptions.
Like a dog to its vomit.
I was lying on a piece of blue tissue roll in one of Tony Blair’s world-class Accident and Emergency hospital departments, a few weeks ago, at around 3am on a Sunday morning. As you do, in such a situation, I was thinking about death, and Simon & Garfunkel albums. But being one who recently qualified as an NLP practitioner, under the tutelage of Californian shaman Richard Bandler, I thought to myself how can I turn this around into a positive experience? How can I come out the other side of this seemingly grim situation mentally refreshed rather than mentally battered? So I made a deal with myself. If I make it out the other side of this alive, I stipulated, I’ll turn the entire experience into a piece for Samizdata. You see, some of us mad-eyed libertarians really do care.
So I was going to bend your ears with a Theodore Dalrymple-style diatribe on the drunken street scum of Berkshire, around me, demanding to be allowed to smoke, and arguing with stoic nurses while dripping with blood from self-induced beer-night injuries. I was also going to mention, in passing, the unpleasant tone of the queue managers, the uncomfortable beds, and the reasons why I was waiting to be seen, after a MASH-style nurse triage, rather than why there wasn’t already a swarm of surgeons all over me instantly administering reassurance, sympathy, and curative scalpel blades. But then I thought, come on Andrew, stop being such a Victor Meldrew prima donna. You’re still breathing, you sad git.
You’ve got a problem, of that there was no doubt, but at least the nurse had seen me, and had determined that a glorious English sunrise would see my smiling face for at least one more happy time before Death sent Mort along to claim his latest victim. The scum of Berkshire may have been regretting picking fights with broken bottles, and the bed may have been uncomfortable, but the surgeon would be along in a minute, right after seeing that screaming baby that had just come in after me. Maybe I wasn’t in the best hospital in the world, and maybe the NHS is crawling with MRSA, and maybe I had been made to shout my medical predicament to the receptionist, behind her plexi-glass shield, so that the fifty other people waiting could hear every detail, but at least I was in the best hospital in the nearest 100 miles, and I would have refused to swap my current position, lying on this blue paper roll, with anything other than instantaneous transportation to Dr McCoy’s sick bay on the starship, Enterprise. → Continue reading: Toot for the NHS
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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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