Tumpty tum

[fred_barnard]

Hi all, not really got much to say bout the events of my life so thought as I haven't done it for a while I'll talk current affairs.

On the day Vivian Westwood opened her new politically contraversial (and overly expensive) line of clothing on this very topic a brazillian women with her remaining children walked the route her son walked on the way

Comments

But my reservations

[anonymous]

I disagree with you on the issue of the NHS, though. There is a fundamental contradiction between the righteous anger you devote to those running our police state, and then your defense of government provided health care. It is an odd position to say that the government can't be trusted when it comes to foreign policy and civil liberties, but that we can trust governments to care for our health!

There are two odd coincidences: On one hand, in the west we have never had bread-lines. Nobody queued for bread outside bread shops. They did in the USSR. On the other hand, we do have long waiting lists for sugery. Now what is the coincidence? Well surgery and health care in the UK are provided the same way that bread was provided in the US, and not at all like bread is provided in the UK. The consequence? Shortages of bread in the USSR and health care in the UK, concerns about the quality of bread in the USSR and health care in the UK, and enormous costs of production of bread in the USSR and in medical care in the UK, wasting resources. In short, bread was produced much better, much cheaper in the UK than in the USSR, precisely because it was not produced the way health care is provided in the USSR. You point out that "it cost the minimum of £750 ponds per week for someone to stay in hospital and thats not including treatment or investigations just to stop there." On the other hand, though, CD players twenty years ago cost several thousand pounds. When sony first marketed the first ever walkman (it was called a walk about) twenty-five years ago, it cost £250. A fairly good walkman will cost you thirty-odd pounds, and will probably be of a better quality than the first sony model 25 years ago.

Are unions the voice of the people? Surely they are the voice of their members? Unions do lots of great things. But they also do lots of bad things, most obviously in trying to win monopoly privileges for their members against would be competitors (usually unskilled workers and immigrants) and against the good of consumers.

Obviously when it is suggested that we would all be better off if the government didn't provide us with health care, people worry about how the poor will get it - though, oddly, the poor do a better job of getting bread than they do of getting healthcare. Well, I suggest that one way of finding out how the poor might get health care when it is not provided by the state is to look at how the poor get health care when it is not provided by the state. These efforts are reminisent of efforts of the poor in this country to get welfare prior to the growth of the welfare state. Much of the development of the modern welfare state, especially the National Insurance Act of 1911, was introduced in order to destroy these independent efforts, provide certain proffessions with monopoly privileges, and to bind the poor to the newly emerging corporate state.