Hayek warned us that we’d all end up serfs to the NHS

The warning, in Road to Serfdom, was not that the existence of a health care service would turn us all into slaves. Nor that a government, or tax, financed health care service would revive serfdom. Rather, that direct government provision of health care would lead to us, the populace, being managed to benefit the health care service. Rather than the NHS taking care of us we would be managed so as to take care of the NHS.

We all do recall being told to stay at home to save the NHS, yes?

Sir Keir Starmer is preparing a raft of “nanny state” interventions on public health as he scrambles to save the NHS from collapse.

The Government promised a “prevention revolution” on Thursday – saying measures would be bold, controversial and not universally popular.

Ministers announced plans to introduce a 9pm watershed on junk food advertising – and a total ban on paid-for online ads – by October next year. Sir Keir has also promised a string of further measures as part of efforts to move “from sickness to prevention” of ill-health.

A ban on energy drinks for children under 16 is expected to be introduced to Parliament next month, with supervised tooth-brushing rolled out for pre-school children later this year.

We are indeed being Nanny-stated for the benefit of that direct government provision of healthcare, the National Health Service.

This is getting pretty extreme too:

Honesty about death is long overdue, as are frank conversations about the tendency to keep very infirm people alive a bit longer with more interventions, instead of allowing them to die more comfortably at home.

One, possibly harsh, way to read that is that Polly thinks Granny should die earlier to save the NHS.

As Chris Snowdon has pointed out:

Starmer is not going to reform the NHS. He is going to try to reform the public.

Well, yes. The Road to Serfdom came out in 1944. A prescient warning, obviously. We would though remind of something about Brecht’s of 9 years later:

Would it not in that case

Be simpler for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

That was satire, criticism, not a plan for action.

We can’t help feeling that paying attention to the warning rather than enacting the satire would be a better government plan.

Tim Worstall