Towards minimal government:
In this post Jock got me thinking. The key lines are these:
the welfare state as conceived by these reformers was a necessary but essentially temporary measure only needed in an economic system that favoured the land-owner, capitalist and banker.
I think that this should be the aim of all welfare, we should be aiming for a situation where nobody needs it due to lack of income.
Take a health service, surely the most liberal system would be a laissez-faire free market one in which everyone can participate. That is nobody is denied health care due to no fault of their own, but with no need for government intervention to ensure that. Whilst that clearly is a long way off at the moment, we should be aiming towards it., something the NHS does not do.
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October 22nd, 2007 at 9:24 am
Of course my prescription, if you pardon the pun, is for full land value tax funding a citizens’ income to distribute the mutually created value of the “common wealth” - economic “land” to everyone equitably. They then choose to eke out a meagre life on that basic income - choosing where to purchase services accordingly - or work however many hours and at whatever rate they are willing to accept (no minimum wage) to top it up with no marginal tax penalties for doing so.
But I’ve been looking more at the Health Service - I concluded something similar about education a month or so back. The NHS is one gigantic protection racket so far as I can see. Necessary it might have been to co-ordinate the distribution of resources when the country was broke, post war, but with GPs contracts and consultants’ contracts, favourable drugs deals with pharmcos, monopoly status and so on today it does have the hallmarks of a protection racket, which cannot be good for the end users.
PS - Maybe it’s just my Firefox, but there’s something really weird about this reply box by the way - it seems not to wrap at the end of the box but about ten characters later and until you type beyond the end of one box height’s worth and get vertical scroll bars there’s no horizontal scroll bar either to let you see what’s “hidden” beyond the end of the box.