Gosport Memorial Hospital shows that Friedrich Hayek was right
There's nothing that will produce more gales of laughter at a meeting of the bien pensants than Hayek's idea that the NHS would lead to serfdom. What? Government provided health care will lead to anything other than a properly planned and efficient health care system? Nonsense, eh, and then the entire argument Hayek actually made is suppressed in gales of giggles.
The argument he actually made simply being that to give the state power over us gives the state more power. If we have government running health care then our health care will be under the control of the state, the politics and politicians who drive said state power.
At which point we get:
Exactly the same cause of death was routinely given by those doctors involved in the “life-shortening” of the mentally incapacitated in Germany in 1939-41. This programme of extinguishing what the Nazis termed Lebensunwertes Leben (life unworthy of life) came to an end when another bishop — Galen of Münster — heroically thundered from his pulpit that fellow citizens were being eliminated merely for being a burden to society, as if their lives had no intrinsic value.
And yet more than 50 years later the same chilling disregard for the intrinsic value of life, however “difficult”, was manifested in an NHS hospital. Is Gosport an isolated case? I wouldn’t count on it.
(That's paywalled, an open discussion here.)
Gosport Memorial Hospital, a part of that NHS, was routinely killing people by overdosing them on opiates. Because, you know. No, really, that was the reason given.
As Hayek might have put it, the difference between socialist and national socialist state power over our lives isn't all that great. Their controlling health care does indeed lead to this serfdom where our very lives are in their gift.
But is is to laugh that this could possibly be true, isn't it? The difficulty being that Hayek was in fact right.
Having given the state control of health care we find that the national religion is topping us left, right and centre for the reason of being a little inconvenient to the state and or its avatars.
Having ignored the warning what do we do now?