Killing The Sacred Cow
And so it ends, the National Compact first dreamt up in the dying days of the Second World War called the Welfare State.
The Welfare State was always a ponzi scheme of gigantic proportions, that relied on the next round of investors paying out to the first batch of ‘investors’. The only difference between the welfare state and criminal schemes of Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff is that you did not have to join their schemes.
With the Welfare State it was and still is compulsory to join, or face the wrath of the state for failing to join a scheme which was bound sooner or later to fail as all ponzi schemes do. Bernie would have loved to have enjoyed that level of compunction.
Lord Warner has ‘advised’ us all that the game is up for the baby boomers and he is calling time on ‘cradle to grave’ welfare state. Yet the political classes will still pretend that they are defending the welfare state and the NHS when they know that the edifice is collapsing around their ears. Ken Clarke is also telling us that the middle classes have no idea the depth of the ‘cuts’ that are going to have to be made. That, Ken, is because the political elite will not dare tell us that it is over for fear of not being elected again.
Rather than treat us as grown ups, and announce the contract between the State and the individual has been broken and the State is defaulting and to start cutting taxes to allow us to make the ‘voluntary’ choice of with whom we spend our medical insurance money with, they are tinkering with a 1950′s system and proposing that instead of anonymous committees of political placemen/women deciding where they will spend our money, that GP practices are best placed to make these financial decisions.
The one set of people that they will not trust to make these decisions with our own money is us. Given the choice of placing your loved one/yourself in a clean efficient hospital or one run by monolith unions and bureaucracies where there is a distinct possibility of you dying of thirst, being starved or contracting something you did not go in with, what rational choice would you make ?
The Fabian parties of the Big State, the deficit denying Labour Party, the soft left Social Democrats and bizarrely the Cameronian Conservative party will carry on protesting the NHS ‘is safe with them’ and everything in the garden of the welfare state is rosy, when they know that greenfly, death-watch beetle and couch grass have rendered it to the level of a bomb site rather than a ‘Health Service that is the envy of the world’
The State will not accept that it will play a diminished role in our lives in future because they need direct and indirect taxes to go up to fill in the black hole in the nation’s finances. Even now the rate of growth in public spending has only slowed, it is not going down.
The Political Classes have broken the Military compact. Blair, supported by the Labour and Conservative Parties started wars then kept the military short of helicopters and basic equipment. The MOD simply lost control of their finances under Brown. Now some faceless bureaucrat is issuing redundancy notices by email to warrant officers. He/She should be facing the sack. However, we will never even find out his or her name.
The game is over. Shoot the Sacred Cow before it falls over with Bovine TB, and let us start taking responsibility for our lives, our future and our health.
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February 16, 2011 at 18:48 -
A Ponzi Scheme, indeed. You’ve really summed it up there. Collapse is inevitable, and delaying it will only make things worse.
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February 16, 2011 at 19:05 -
The great political conundrum of the day is how to break the entitlement culture and instill personal responsibility. If we can, we might start to claw our way out of the pit of economic madness we now writhe in. If we don’t, we’re f…. erm, in a mess.
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February 16, 2011 at 20:23 -
They’ll break the contract all right, but if you think they are about to reduce taxes, you’re living in cloud cuckoo land.
They’ll take the money AND not provide the service; it’s what they do.
The State is not your friend.
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February 17, 2011 at 02:50 -
Exactly. The whole idea behind “Big Society” is to prepare you for the time when you give over half your income to the state to provide you with services which nonetheless you will have to provide for yourself.
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February 16, 2011 at 21:11 -
The labour government giving handouts to all and sundry that made it into the country didn’t help matters.
It should be that ALL incomers should have to have been earning and paying taxes for at least five years before they can get ANY handout from the state. That might help solve two problems at once – keep the creaking system running a bit longer (maybe not a good thing) and make the country very unattractive for all the layabouts that see us as a soft touch.
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February 16, 2011 at 21:29 -
If the NHS had been formed as envisaged by Lord Beveridge it would probably still be fit for purpose, but the Labour government of 1945- 51 could not resist tinkering with it. No labour government has ever shown any ability to handle taxpayers money in a sensible manner. The way they set up the NHS is a fine example of this. The Beveridge plan was a good plan, cocked up by Labour.
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February 17, 2011 at 07:37 -
Don’t forget the NHS was initially set up under the premise that, once it had made everybody well, the cost of maintaining the NHS would stabilise or even go down…
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February 16, 2011 at 21:34 -
But the WHOLE world system is a Ponzi scheme.
The politicians talk about sustainability and in the same sentence GROWTH!
Economic growth is THE mantra. It pervades the whole lot, not just the state. Your private health company borrows the capital against future ‘growth’. We are told we need immigrants to push the ‘growth’ (that is daft, it is zero-sum, it gives negative ‘growth’ in their home lands).
All politicians and bankers should be forced to learn the conservation of energy law, but then if your time horizon is the next election or the next bonus why bother?
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February 16, 2011 at 22:24 -
I have never considered that I will recieve my U.K. state pension, when I reach retirement age in however many years time, I do not know for sure as they keep raising the retirement age. As I do not have a state pension of any merit in France, my country of permanent residence, it looks as I will be working until I drop, no bother for me as what I do has given me much more pleasure than alchohol ( never understood the pleasures of being “roaring” drunk ) or drugs and in certain circumstances the addrenelin rush from building and then competing on my work can come close to the physical athletics of a young(er) couple. So I always knew that the way the U.K. govt. squandered money on just about every political initiative it ever espoused meant that it would be no cosy retirement for someone who has always actually worked hard, as opposed to work as politicians, bankers, local authority cheif executives et al, who claim to” comprehend ” the ethos of hard work but who, from personal experience, when offered to engage in it find a reason not to be there to do it, often accompanied by a peurile tantrum triggered by there grossly over exagerated opinion of themselves. I look forward to my older age even without the supposed nest egg of a big pension, life is always much more entertaining if one has to live it rather than watch it go by from the comfort of a big bank balance.
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February 17, 2011 at 03:01 -
The current system is a product of the post war boom when employment was high, life expectancy and retirement age were virtually the same and state of the art medical care was antibiotics. Those days are over and never coming back. No amount of rejigging a 1950s system is going to make it work in the 21st century, the sooner we accept that, the better.
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February 17, 2011 at 06:24 -
I have been saying this for years, but not nearly so well.
Anyone else doing this would have been locked up, have been locked up, actually.
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February 17, 2011 at 06:47 -
It is all very well you calling for us to take responsibility for our own lives, but some are less fortunate. Are you willing to walk by and watch children in poverty? Are you content to enjoy your private health and watch old women die of cancer without painkillers, just because they can’t afford them?
Would you watch a single-mother starve and see her child motherless because she couldn’t afford to eat?
No, the welfare state may have flaws, but it is better than nothing. Rather than killing the sacred cow, send for the vet.
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February 17, 2011 at 07:24 -
– and ‘before the welfare state’ there was ‘nothing’ – is that your argument Tacitus?
Before the welfare state, people took care of their family and their friends, yes, some fell by the wayside – exactly as they do today, if the welfare state had cured the problem of elderly people starving to death, or children being abused, you might have a point, but it hasn’t, it is an imperfect attempt to replace community spirit, and it hasn’t worked.
Libertarianism isn’t a creed of ‘look after number one’ and let everyone else starve to death – it is a creed of personal responsibility – and that means not just standing by whilst someone starves to death, but doing something about it personally, not leaving a message on the out of hours service at Social Services.-
February 18, 2011 at 11:51 -
“…it is an imperfect attempt to replace community spirit…”
I don’t think so. I think it was put in place to combat the mischief that was the grinding and unremitting poverty obtaining for large sections of society. That is not to say there was no active individual or communal philanthropy, simply that the same was insufficient to combat the mischief.
I do not mean to suggest that the welfare state has retained the virtue of its original purpose, quite the reverse: It has moved to such extreme that it now creates a new and perhaps more insidious form of poverty and degradation. (The same principle might be applied to the egalitarian ideal of state education, but that’s another issue.)
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February 17, 2011 at 08:56 -
Whilst I agree there are areas where the state needs to commit resources – care of the elderly for example. Watch this space…
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