government incompetence

 Can this be true?  That with whatever it is, fourteen CCTV cameras per capita, or one camera for every fourteen of us, or some similar number, it has taken until now to get the first local authorities',camera setups Data Protection Act compliant?  That's what this appears to suggest:

UK first for North Lanarkshire CCTV network

The company which operates CCTV cameras across North Lanarkshire has become the first in the UK to be fully compliant with data protection legislation.

 North Lanarkshire CCTV Ltd has more than 300 cameras covering town centres, schools and housing estates on behalf of the local council.

It has been given a Platinum Award by industry body, CameraWatch.

Jeepers, it has taken three years to get me DPA clearance to be able to e-mail the students that live in the blocks I am responsible for in halls to give them important admin and safety information.  And all these cameras not in Lanarkshire are in breach of the Act?

Excellent stuff from Ben Goldacre about how relatively few medical treatments and the like really can back up the claims in their adverts, aimed at medical professionals, with high quality research and evidence.

And for this sort of stuff we pay for state-monopoly drugs regulators, "clinical excellence" panels and similar, whose effect is to push up the costs of medical developments whilst holding back potential miracle cures and now also, it seems, letting through an awful lot of potential quackery dressed up as science.

Surely a competing market in certification could only do better.  After all, that is really just what the numerous studies highlighted by Goldacre are really doing, except that they have no real way of "monetizing" their findings as, say, competing medical insurance companies would do.  Just publishing their findings in just as obscure publications and hoping, beyond hope it seems, that someone will bother to notice.  

All the vested interests are against them - from the regulators themselves whose shoddiness is exposed, to the doctors who may now be embarrassed at having fallen for false claims, and the pharmaceutical companies who have thus far managed to get away with who knows, perhaps, murder.  This unholy alignment could so easily all be changed by real competition, and the biggest beneficiaries would be...the patients and the people who pay for their care.

Even many who are relatively sympathetic to free market minarchist and mutualist ideals where as much as possible is done through voluntary rather than coercive statist mechanisms often have a problem envisaging a system in which no state apparatus exists.  Two of the most common objections are that we at least need a state to administer "justice" and to ensure "national defense".  Even intellectual heavyweights such as Robert Nozick felt that a de facto "state", at least at a local level, would emerge from private law enforcement agencies.

So I'm often on the lookout for literature that explains how a private law based society would work, indeed would vastly improve upon the current predominant state run model, and so I am delighted to point my reader to "Chaos Theory", a pair of short essays, one on "justice" and the other on "national defense" by Robert P Murphy.  It is available as a freely downloadable PDF at the Mises.org site.  You can also buy a dead tree version (though I find delivery costs too high at Mises.org to justify having these sent to the UK).

It also provides further illustration of the point I was making in my previous piece on how respect for private property and contracts frees us from the need for a state.

I have also prepared an MP3 audiobook version, which is attached to this post.  It's mainly just for me to listen to again on the way to work, but if you'd prefer to listen than to read, and can face my dulcet tones, feel free to use it, Robert Murphy has given his permission.  It's only an hour and a half long, so you can judge how long it will take you to read this very accessible introduction to some of the ideas involved.

Particularly on the "justice" side, I can see ways in which the Mutualist ideal of creating such institutions and mechanisms within the current system could be successful.  Since the non-aggression principle would not rely on the same ability conferred on state agents (i.e. the police) to arrest someone, there is no reason why such mechanisms could not operate successfully on private property at present.

Powered by Qumana

I'm cold. There's no doubt about it, it is cold. But that's no good reason to deny what seemingly everyone else is saying - that it's getting warmer, and dangerously so - is it? But the fact is, I'm not a climate scientist; I suspect if I were I would probably be little the wiser. But since I'm not, I do not have the evidence to say whether they are right or wrong on global warming: is it different this time from previous warming or cooling events; if it is, is it man-made; can we stop it; should we stop it; what happens if we don't. Clearly a few scientists in one of the world's newest sciences has made the case, and we're all, or nearly all at least, listening, and scared. And yes, we want to do something about it, well, lots of us anyway.

However, watching the very few snippets of news coverage from Copenhagen I have seen just makes me realise how wrong headed all this is. It's just like that G8 lot that turns my stomach so. Look, if such a great proportion of people have voted to elect people around the world on the basis of their promises to do something about climate change, if global warming and the environment more generally are so high on peoples' priorities, why on earth, in the name of all that is holy, do they think politicians and state, or supra-state, action is going to do anything about it.

Look, it is the state that has got us into this problem of anthropogenic global warming, if that's really what is going on. As any good mutualist will tell you, exploitation is only possible when the owners of capital and the appropriators of natural scarce commodities harness the power of the state in the defence of their interests. That goes for the exploitation of labour, just as much as the ability to externalise costs.

Everyone moans that libertarianism scarcely has anything to say about the environment. and it often seems that way, and even when it does its primary response is to talk about privatising the "commons" so that owners have a clear interest and a clear responsibility for the bits of it they use and if they abuse that in such a way as affects others' parts of it they can be held accountable. But I've now realised that that answer is merely touching on the symptoms, not the problem itself. And the problem is that it is the state that has created the very circumstances in which not only does such exploitation thrive, but that it is actually necessary just for economic actors to be able to deal with the economic disaster that is state "management" of macro-economic factors.

It is the state that fails, time and time again, to maintain a stable currency, resulting in great tsunamis of inflation against which producers have to swim just to stand still. It is the state that takes so much of its constituent economic actors' production that they have to double, literally, their production in order to turn an ordinary profit. And it is states that have given away huge swathes of "the commons" for virtually nothing, at the behest of the corporations who can best afford to persuade them to do so, without those corporations having to put a real value on those goods and account for them properly.

And all you folk think that states, even states working together - or herding cats as it is known - can put an end to all the environmentally destructive consequences of their previous folly? Utter codswallop. States can no more switch off the economic treadmill they have created and on which we must all run ever faster, unsustainably faster, than their leaderships appear to understand how it got started - for it is that treadmill that powers those same states, and their leaderships.

The power we need to learn to stop using, stop wasting, is that state power, which is so dependent on unsustainable economic activity to keep itself alive. It is not too late: people may claim that we have "reached the tipping point" and that things are now moving so fast that even if the real answer was once more "human scale production" and such mutualist niceties that would have meant we would have never got so far towards destroying the planet it's gone so far we need to reverse it, not merely slow down. But it's none of the sort - pull the plug on all the state protection of capital and we'd very quickly be able to shift our productive and innovative capacities into things other than the "thneeds" that economies (especially developing ones but certainly not exclusively) chuck out in unsustainable quantities because they are an easy way to maintain one's place on the treadmill.

No, I'm not a "climate change denier" - I just...don't...know. But what I am is deeply sceptical of "movements" demanding we all have to do this or that, especially when the thinly veiled, and at times over the last week or so not so veiled as the world-wide movement has become more and more shrill in its demands, calls are for some kind of world government action. If we, as individuals, really put this issue right there at the top of our concerns, then we, as individuals, will find ways, spontaneously, in a genuinely free market, one in which the actors cannot exploit either labour or nature because there can be no government to assist them in that, to respond to our demands.

And what I am sure about is that more state action is not the answer. It is that which got us to this point, and it is not that which will get us out of it, even if they can agree on anything meaningful. "Light Greens" know all this - inherently anarchist of the "human scale technology" school, brothers and sisters of mutualism and sensible liberal economics. But we are in the grip of the "Dark Greens" who appear to be nothing of the kind - a bunch of authoritarian crypto-communists who crave nothing more than some kind of world power pushing their message and the "initiatives" we will have to take to respond to that message. Let us not forget that it was and indeed is the most state controlled economies whose labour was forcibly cheap that belched out commons destroying pollution in unmatched quantities whilst doing absolutely nothing for the overall wealth of their citizens. Do we want to return to that sort of poverty - I suspect some would like us to, though they won't say so, because they know the prospect of their Green Dark Age is not one that will win them favours. They must not be given the opportunity to force us to do so.

All the emails, all the messages I've received over the last month, from demanding I get involved in something called "The Wave" to the endless e-mails from Avaaz and their likes claiming that our incompetent fool of a Prime Minister asked them to organise a world wide demo to show support for their negotiating position, have but created a movement feeding the ego-mania of a few individuals who see opportunities for themselves in global mandated action. They could have been used to create genuine democracy, operating through free markets, to create demand for the sort of innovations we will need if this "crisis" if that is what it is, is to be solved.

So there could possibly not have been a better week in which to have launched the new party group "Lib Dems for Drug Policy Reform". Please, if you want your anger channeled into a useful cause, go have a look, sign up, and ensure that the Lib Dems are the party of the "big three" who dare to take this debate forward in a responsible way.

Challenging the existing "war on drugs" mentality of drugs policy does not mean supporting or promoting drug use. It simply means dealing with it in some other way than treating everyone involved as criminals. Joining LDDPR does not mean you want to see the streets full of doped up multi-substance abusing drop outs. It simply means we want to see a sensible and responsible debate about other approaches. Especially in the light of evidence from other countries - such as Portugal - that have recently shown that a less criminal policy approach and a more health policy approach can both reduce harm and overall consumption quite significantly.

Expert body after expert body over the past decade has challenged the prevailing classification and criminalization based policy, both those produced by government appointed advisors and external groups such as the RSA. All have been comprehensively ignored or even ignobly trashed by government. This is a complete dereliction of duty on the part of government. Either drugs, or the current system of dealing with them (whichever side of the fence you sit on) cause great harm, including serious illness and death, and the "war on drugs" contributes to misery and death in communities around the world, including here.

For the government to have ignored suggestions that might mitigate these appalling effects of the drug trade and the way we police it, is for them to say "we're putting public opinion before lives". Or "we are happy that some people die so long as we look macho". It is an utterly immoral stance. If this is indeed a "war" on drugs, then those who make such immoral decisions, as government ministers consistently have, are the "war criminals" in this war, and must face justice for their actions.

Earlier this month Margaret Godden and I steered a motion through South Central regional conference to call on Federal Policy Committee to ensure that drugs policy is amongst the first things to be reviewed in a new round of policy work. We did not wish to disrupt preparations for a General Election with what can be a contentious issue. Following Johnson's disgraceful behaviour however, for which I assume the entire cabinet has some collective responsibility (at least nobody has demurred so far), I think we should be taking a much more forthright line immediately. This immoral government has handed the last shreds of so called "evidence based policy making" to us on a plate for all the public to see.

If you excuse the pun, Johnson and his ilk need a good "nutting" and the sooner the better.

You can access a registration form for the event at the ACMD's website at the Home Office. Closing date for applications for a ticket (free) is 5th November so you only have a few days to get your dibs on a seat at what promises to be an interesting meeting.

I suggest that you go along and call for all of the remaining 30 members of the Council to step down en masse. They cannot have confidence that the Home Office respects their views or pays them any more than the lip service they are statutorily bound to pay them under the Misuse of Drugs Act which obliges the Home Secretary to consult, but not to heed the advice of this statutory body of experts, before any legislation or orders are made under the Act.

By coincidence, I notice that today Kevin Carson has a post up about the State's role as a drug baron itself at the Centre for a Stateless Society, and that the UK now has a branch of "Students for a Sensible Drug Policy" (SSDP) which I have been supporting in the US for some time.  Maybe someone could establish an Oxford Brookes Chapter?

In the run up to 1997, I remember that one somewhat better, the Iron Lady was gone, love her or hate her, and the Tory government had become mired in "sleaze" and policy-wise had run out of steam, full of the second division of ministers that had emerged under Thatcher. Tony Blair and his New Labour project was another "Big Idea" whose time had come. Labour without the socialism. Economically responsible. With a plan.

And so we've had Thatcherism and Blairism over that past thirty years. But I think we will not get Brownism or Cameronism. Now, even moreso than in 1979, and certainly moreso than in 1997, we need a "Big Idea". Not merely a change of management. And, for all the coverage, I cannot see any "Big Idea" coming out of Old Queen Street. To prove their management credentials, they present, at their big show case conference before likely victory, a managerial mock-budget. Talk of freezing public sector pay, of everyone working for an extra year before retirement; these are not going to solve the terminal systemic problems in the anglo-saxon pensions system or the bloated state, unable to sap any more out of a shattered and second class productive economy.

And today's "Big Idea" ought to be not looking at how the State can be tweaked here and there or managed differently, but to look at the very nature of the State itself. As I quoted Albert Jay Nock in me previous post, here he is again, also from "Our Enemy The State":

The condition of public affairs in all countries, notably in our own, has done more than bring under review the mere current practice of politics, the character and quality of representative politicians, and the relative merits of this-or- that form or mode of government. It has served to suggest attention to the one institution whereof all these forms or modes are but the several, and, from the theoretical point of view, indifferent, manifestations. It suggests that finality does not lie with consideration of species, but of genus; it does not lie with consideration of the characteristic marks that differentiate the republican State, monocratic State, constitutional, collectivist, totalitarian, itlerian, Bolshevist, what you will. It lies with consideration of the State itself.

[...]

It appears to me that with the depletion of social power going on at the rate it is, the State-citizen should look very closely into the essential nature of the institution that is bringing it about. He should ask himself whether he has a theory of the State, and if so, whether he can assure himself that history supports it. He will not find this a matter that can be settled off-hand; it needs a good deal of investigation, and a stiff exercise of reflective thought. He should ask, in the first place, how the State originated, and why; it must have come about somehow, and for some purpose. This seems an extremely easy question to answer, but he will not find it so. Then he should ask what it is that history exhibits continuously as the State’s primary function. Then, whether he finds that “the State” and “government” are strictly synonymous terms; he uses them as such, but are they? Are there any invariable characteristic marks that differentiate the institution of government from the institution of the State? Then finally he should decide whether, by the testimony of history, the State is to be regarded as, in essence, a social or an anti-social institution?

Nock, of course, concludes as I too conclude; that the State is an anti-social institution - the enemy of social power that it unremittingly destroys. And so the "Big Idea" for today is, in fact a "socialist" revolution. A complete reversal of the centuries' old process of State power usurping Social power and never giving it back. Not the "socialism" corrupted by the coercive statist tendencies of the twentieth century "left", or of the "social democratic" tendency. But the confidence that social power can achieve what the do-gooders believe their states can do only much better.

It is an irony that in our own party what we think of and term "social liberalism" reflects a belief that the state should help liberalism flourish by its supposedly judicious interventions. For true "social liberalism" ought to be the belief, expressed by Nock, or Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon or Gustav de Molinari that through genuine liberalism social power does not need the coercive state.

As David Boaz puts it in his "Libertarianism: A Primer":

The right term for the advocates of civil society and free markets is arguably socialist. Thomas Paine distinguished between society and government, and the libertarian writer Albert Jay Nock summed up all the things that people do voluntarily--for love or charity or profit--as "social power," which is always being threatened by the encroachment of State power. So we might say that those who advocate social power are socialists, while those who support State power are statists.

State Power is created by conquest and confiscation. From what Paine described as the "French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives" the state has exploited. It was no less exploitative from the seventeenth century Commonwealth's installation of mercantilist power - merely a different group was exploited. Nor, for all the talk that the universal franchise was the zenith of democratic achievement, has that exploitation ceased just because everyone now has a theoretical say - again, just another group, or groups, exploited from time to time. State power is the true "opium of the masses" with its ability to whisper softly, intoxicatingly to us that "the State will provide".

For those managerial politicians, those would be state exploiters, who cannot get away from their amateur management-speak, what we need is to "zero base" the state. For the state is no defier of the laws of the universe: for every state action there is an automatic and most likely undesirable reaction. It is state created privilege that enables some to exploit others' natural competitiveness in the market. And then the state says it needs to intervene and "redistribute" what would be more naturally distributed if that privilege had not been granted in the first place: more coercion, more exploitation, more state power. Every intervention of the state needs to be examined for the usually detrimental effects it has elsewhere and which it then claims as reason to usurp yet more social power to fix.

And we will find, invariably, that left well alone, without the depredations of the state in the first place, social power would have worked better. Social power, the power of all the associations we make one with another, even the ones we don't know about, such as my relationship with the forger of the brass ferrule in Leonard Read's "Pencil" whom I cannot know, is the only thing that can end this spiral of managerial, coercive, exploitative and ultimately futile statism. And its resurgence needs to start now, before George and Dave, and all that seek to come after them, manage to destroy it utterly. And with our now massively increased ability, through modern technology and communication, to organize for ourselves, for "people [to] have more to do with each other and governments less" there has never been a better time than now.

Socialism: it's not what you think!

There are a few vocal Lib Dem members who appear to delight in every possible opportunity to denigrate libertarians in the party, and to dismiss us as the vanguard of a neo-Thatcherite "right" that they (correctly) feel would be incompatible with our party. I say that such denigrators are not only only being unpardonably rude and abusive to fellow party members, bringing the historical commitment to pluralism of opinion of the party and movement descended from the likes of J S Mill into disrepute, but also that they are themselves demonstrating a fundamental and pitiful ignorance of their own party's and philosophy's history. A history which both those who are now called libertarians on the one hand and the "social democratic liberals" that have tended to dominate the party and its descendents on the other for much of the past century share.

I can trace the moment of the beginning of my journey to libertarianism to a specific date, 28th May 2002, a lovely Tuesday afternoon in the Assembly Room at Oxford Town Hall. It was the first meeting of the tongue-twistingly Orwellian named "Economic and Social Wellbeing Overview and Scrutiny Committee" after I had been defeated in the local elections. I had been chair of the said committee prior to the elections and had been asked by the chair-elect, Lib Dem councillor Fiyaz Mughal, if I would mind attending the first one of the new council year as an observer in case there were any issues carried over from the previous year that I might assist with.

Being on the council one tends to get all wrapped up in the feeling that you are doing important work; that you are "making a difference"; "contributing to your community". And throughout my period on the council I had been known as someone who strongly believed that if we could only make government run service delivery that bit more efficient it would indeed be better than leaving it to private profiteering operators; that we might even make similar "profits" ourselves that could be used to fund other "good works" out of running quality services. So much enamoured was I of the possibility of public sector delivery being such a generator rather than consumer of resources I was known within the local party, and described at AGMs as "Jock, the one sitting over there on the far left".

This meeting blew a gaping hole in that rosy view of public sector delivery. I have always subsequently described it as a "meeting to discuss what they wanted to talk about next time they met to discuss what it was they were going to discuss in future meetings". It's not that I don't believe that most of the "elected ones" sincerely believe, or have convinced themselves at least, that they are well intentioned, and that a few of them actually are, but if they could see what I saw, "from the outside", I really felt that most of them, at least any with the vaguest modicum of intelligence, would begin to see that there could, nay must, be other, better, more efficient and even more "democratic" ways of delivering the sort of things they believed needed to be done.

I cannot think of any other sort of an organization that would allow policy and delivery to be handled through multiple meetings of rank amateurs who often don't really understand the report they are reading, and certainly don't appear to appreciate how tortuously slow the process is compared with any efficient organization whose ability to survive financially if nothing else would be compromised by such Byzantine processes demanded of a "democratically elected body" that was responsible for "spending others' money wisely".

But nothing, in that moment at that meeting, changed the reasons I had wanted to be on the council in the first place: that I thought that was the preferred way of helping make a difference for people less well off. I merely felt, albeit very powerfully, that this "representative government" thing was not the mechanism that could make people better off, more equal, more free. How I have moved from that small realization, to the position I hold today that almost no other mechanism could in fact be worse than this "representative government" thing; indeed that the heavy hand even of local government and other state sponsored interventions in fact stifles other potentially much better ways (such as through my own experience working on Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts) is a much longer tale.

Thankfully, with or without state attempts to prevent it, horrors such as the Soham murders and mercifully very few and far between. Strangers remain a much smaller source of abuse than people who are known to their victims - usually within families or extended family groups. The more recent case of "Baby P" in Haringey just goes to show how, even with the intense scrutiny of the state child protection apparatus, the worst cannot always be prevented.

But the idea of bureaucratically vetting virtually everyone, even in informal arrangements, who will assist in keeping kids activities going through volunteering to drive their own and their friends' kids to clubs and events and so on seems to me to threaten what must, or at least ought, to be the first line of child protection - friends and local communities.

A quick check on a database is not going to get to the source of abuse, it's just going to make people more suspicious of others. It is the mother who, taking their own child to school or the football match calls in to pick up one of their friends who will notice first a child that is showing signs of stress at home - upset when they leave the house, or upset when it's time to go home. Small character changes over time - maybe more sullen or moody or nervous or tired. All that sort of thing. They may pick up on a bit of yelling. Their own child may be more reluctant to travel with someone else's parent because they're always shouting at the kids and so on.

So, if you are at all nervous about something in your past (whether child related or not - a quarter of the adult population are not going to understand the nuances of what appears on a CRB check and may not want to take the risk), perhaps you decide that if you cannot be part of the match-day lift rota the best thing would be to withdraw your kid from that activity. So fewer and fewer people are in your informal support network, your child gets even more under your feet stuck at home all the time or making particular calls on your time because you're not sharing the burden with anyone else. Well, that's when a short temper might tip over into abuse where it would not have done previously.

You see the problem for me is that we have, over time, put far too much trust in the state to carry the responsibilities that we all, as families and communities, should really bear, and, in fact only can bear - for 200 staff at some government agency (even when augmented by stretched and harassed police or social services departments) cannot possibly build that sort of incidental and pervasive knowledge of all the families in informal community networks.

The fact is, that harassed by the state for the best part of half our labour, harassed by the state's protection of landed interests and the banking cartel making the big ticket items in life so much more expensive than they would be otherwise, we are more and more forced to work so long and so hard that we do not have as much time as we once did for these sort of community networking activities. Yet another example of the state taking away with one hand and then having to go to extraordinary, disproportionate, and I predict ineffectual lengths to try to make up for the consequences of their predation on ordinary people.

This pandering to the "something must be done" culture, is not necessarily about child protection as much as about getting more and more information about people and their networks into central databases. That is how the state, especially the "transformational state" works. And it must be resisted. What "must be done" instead then...

How about instead of all this futile bureaucracy, a "Good Samaritan" law that places a duty on people to act when they see or hear indications that a problem may be developing. Not as snitches necessarily, nor accusatory, but as someone who asks questions when they see a child in distress or behaving unusually, who can offer some support and, if problems don't resolve themselves, then an early intervention from more experienced assistance.

Put a bit of responsibility back onto friends, connections and communities, instead of trying to absolve them of all responsibility - and taking more of their money to do so. They are the only ones who really can logistically do the job.

The debate in the US over the merits of socialized medicine appears to be being successfully portrayed in the rest of the world as the great majority forces of light and twentieth century social liberal ideals of care for all against a tiny minority of the forces of darkness, right wing nut-jobs who really want an agonizing death for anyone without the savings to be able to buy a heart for transplant from some Indian street urchins.

Comparisons on both sides are being made with the NHS and the Canadian systems, with the pro-Obama opinion pointing out the benefits of cradle to grave free at the point of access health care equal for all, and the anti-socialized medicine opinion pointing out the queues, the lack of choice, the fact that some people die because an available treatment is not permitted on several grounds and the total overall cost.

For those of us not politically active in the UK in the 1940s it should be a fascinating debate (if it weren't being so hideously caricatured on both sides). Because more or less ever since the National Health Service Act was passed in 1948 it seems to me that nobody has seriously challenged the NHS model, seen as it is with great "affection" as the mainstay of our post-war "enlightened" caring society. On this side of the Atlantic it seems the majority of any opinion being expressed is along the lines of cheering and celebration that what we have had for sixty years finally America is going to get and propel them into that enlightened caring society at last.

But we should take the debate much more seriously, for when the critics of socialized medicine make their case, they are, in effect, making the case against our NHS as well - highlighting potential failings that we no longer even bother looking for. First off, we should understand that the opposition is itself two separate oppositions.

In the one corner are the beneficiaries of the current, and admittedly badly broken in my opinion, system of HMO's, big pharma, heavy regulation and legal (both state and federal) protectionism that makes a few organizations and individual very wealthy but actively prevents the sort of health care we would want to see everyone able to access. But I suspect that these folk are not the sort of people many who would want to see big change in health care provision here would support.

In the other corner, and with a far more honest, sincere and coherent critique, are those who recognize that the current system is deeply flawed, expensive and exclusive, but that that is itself caused by state interference, and that actually nationalizing that system will end up even more expensive for all (though of course hidden in government rather than household or company budgets), and entrench the sort of rationing culture that is now so evident in our own NHS. The message from these people is that the solution is not to throw more regulation, more money and more centralized control at the problem, but radically to reduce the red tape and protectionist regulations at all levels - to reduce the grip of big pharma and of lobby groups, of professional accreditation bodies in whose members' interests it is to keep health care resources scarce and therefore lucrative.

And this is the side I am on. I do not want to see the NHS broken apart and true competition introduced into UK healthcare because I want to end the idea of care for all, but because as a monopoly with more or less centralized control and hence no real measures of cost effectiveness together with the fact that it is financed by taxes - a mechanism that is inherently unable to allocate resources efficiently - it is more expensive, less flexible and more exclusive than the alternatives. Bevan was reputed to have said when asked what he would do if doctors refused to join the new scheme in 1948 that he would "stuff their mouths with gold": a prediction that has embedded huge levels of economic rent in the medical professions ever since.

And so, I commend to you this piece, "Health Care: An Anarchist Approach" by Gary Chartier at the Centre for a Stateless Society which sums up well the argument of those of us, like myself, who want the state out of these sort of essential goods precisely because all they ever do is screw it all up and make things more expensive. Please go read the whole lot, but I will end with his bullet point recommendations. We still need to have this debate here.

A Sensible Policy Agenda

Bottom line: the thing government officials could do to reduce health care costs would be to get out of the way. They could:

1. Stop offering protection to patents and copyrights.
2. Eliminate hospital accrediting and professional licensing rules, leaving a variety of flexible, competing market-based certification systems to do the job..
3. Limit malpractice awards to actual damages plus the costs of recovery (including reasonable legal fees)
4. Repeal regulations that prevent the sale of insurance across state lines and the prevent the operation of what amount to insurance schemes by health professionals.
5. Alter the tax code to de-link employment and insurance. (This change would have the potential to boost net taxes, of course, if it weren’t made in tandem with the tax cuts for which I’ve argued.)
6. Replace the FDA approval process with competitive private certification systems.

And government officials could also ensure that ordinary people had the resources needed to pay for (newly much less expensive) health care. They could:

1. Eliminate licensing, zoning, and related restrictions that help people from starting small, low-capital businesses.
2. Eliminate rules that prevent poor people from entering business regarded as off-limits (like selling non-approved pharmaceuticals—which could, again, be certified by competitive, voluntary, market-based certification services).
3. Eliminate rules that force poor people to choose between the kind of housing middle-class planners and neighborhood busybodies prefer—and no housing at all.
4. Eliminate import duties.
5. Dramatically slash the tax burden at the state and federal level—sharply increasing the standard income tax deduction and the Earned Income Tax Credit—and making corresponding reductions in spending.

Notice how this package of reforms would work. It would ensure that poor people had more money. By eliminating monopolies (and quasi-monopolistic market distortions like tax subsidies for particular insurance choices), it would also ensure that prices for health care services—whether purchased directly or provided via insurers—were lower. By keeping a competitive market in place, it would ensure that competitive market pressures would tend to elevate overall product and service quality. And because it wouldn’t involve the installation of yet another czar, or the equivalent, because it would leave people free to make their own health-care choices, it would preserve liberty rather than limiting it. It would achieve all three of the goals proponents of current health-care reform measures say they want.

But such a plan would be anything but a continuation of the status quo. It would be a dramatic attack on the status quo, one that redistributed wealth from privileged monopolists to ordinary people, and dramatically increased the likelihood of access to inexpensive, high-quality medical care for all Americans.