If you want a sense of how utterly unrelated to reality our modern political class remains, it was in the recent declaration by the “Minister for Primary Care” (oh please) Roisin Shortall that the government would introduce “free” GP treatment for all by 2015 and universal health insurance in 2016.
The following year, no doubt, the government will eliminate our dependency on oxygen, following the Equality Tribunal’s finding that it is discriminatory. The year after that, all children will be issued with gills.
Poor old Roisin: she hasn’t got it, has she? Nor have the dedicated socialists of the Labour Party, which in the 1990s gave its middle class voters “free” university education. The old order is dying: it was born in the 1930s, and brought to maturity in the post-war epoch. It is the order which gave politicians the ability to interfere totally in the lives of their constituents, from the cot to the coffin. The pretext/justification for this was the welfare of the electorate: but since when did politicians ever do anything that they thought was right but which would cause them not to be re-elected? The shy, principled politician is as viable a life-form as the nitrogen-breathing equality-commissioner.
The malignantly benign belief that the state exists to shelter its citizenry from all the vagaries of life has spread from Europe to the USA, Canada and Australia. Just about everywhere that it has been tried is now undergoing an apparently irreversible economic and social crisis, as states are torn in different directions by the contrasting interests of competing elites. Classically, there are the time-travelling banking-elites, the party-political elites, the untaxed billionaire mobile-elites, the public-service bureaucratic-elites, and the dole-addicted sloth-elites. These depend on a fictional wealth that has been created by time-travelling bankers who have been authorised by the party-political elites, supervised by the public-service bureaucratic elites, to journey to the future to loot the current accounts of our great grandchildren.
The demoralised consequences can be seen everywhere across Europe: in Roman cafes, in Kentish orchards, in Fingal strawberry-fields, the work is being done by outsiders — often illegal — while down the road, work-shy natives are drawing the dole and numerous “benefits” (a now quite meaningless term that is utterly unrelated to its moral, political or etymological origins). In the US, the “middle-class” — once defined by a high work-ethic, a belief in the rewards of education, an ambition to own property, and a profound patriotism — is facing extinction, trapped between the colliding glaciers of falling property markets, higher taxation, deeper debt and a declining cultural self-belief.
In Europe especially, politicians have repeatedly used the instruments of the welfare state to buy the votes of the electorates. Hence the absurd notion that 1.5 million people in this Republic can have medical cards, with free medical treatment, either placing the price of their entire health care on the other 1.5 million people working, or — in reality — on the unborn. The €50 medical card entry fee being proposed by Labour is, if anything, even sillier than no charge at all, because it will give the holders the illusion of a real payment, and will fuel an even more ruinous sense of entitlement. And of course, GPs will encourage healthy card-holding patients to return to their surgeries, for the doctors will be paid by “the state” for every visit. Except, of course, this will be another fallopian felony: the people actually paying for this will be the great grandchildren of the participants of today’s grisly and unprincipled transactions.
Everywhere across the western world, the political classes have engaged in insane borrowing-competitions, to be repaid in the tomorrow-land that is Ovaria. This is multi-dimensional money-lending, based on ancient compound interest, modern obstetrics and a blind faith that contraception, abortions and vibrators will not result in a steep demographic decline. And so any possible cuts to health or education budgets are not discussed rationally but simply and abusively re-named by the antediluvian-left, as “Thatcherite”, “monetarist”, “Tory”, “reactionary”. Thus the toxic borrowing addition is reinforced, as those who try to talk economic or moral sense are rendered unelectable. The key individual in this ruinous financial order is not a bank manager or a hedge-fund investor, but the midwife.
Pretending anything is free is the cruellest and stupidest aspect of any creed, because it injects a bubble of self-righteous gas right into the heart of the work-ethic. Hundreds of millions of people across Europe now believe they are entitled to “free” health services; and they believe this most acutely if they are not prepared to work. The welfare state’s original safety net became an occasional hammock which became a permanent bed. Hence the malingerer’s unspoken refrain: “No, thank you, waiting on tables or picking fruit is beneath me: I will live on the state, and illegal foreigners may do the work that I choose not to do: but please do not allow these parasitic immigrants to become legal.” That is the brainless heresy which unites Athens, Aberdeen, Athlone and even Arizona.
Or rather, did unite. It’s over. That model is finished. The era of inter-generational grand larceny is coming to an end. So back to the drawing board, chaps.