SOLO-NZ Op-Ed: Health System - Let's Take a Knife to Nanny and Start Over with Libertarianz.
Mark Hubbard
March 17, 2008
Social commentator and man about the world, Clive James, speaking of Soviet-style 'free' health circa the Cold War, hit
upon the obvious truth Socialist apologists in the West would rather have ignored, that the Soviet health system was not
free at all - in fact it cost the Russian people everything they had, right down to their freedoms and their lives. For
a Russian individual to have questioned this fact of reality normally meant literally their death at the hand of the
State, and although we're not quite that dire in New Zealand, I have yet for some years now similarly questioned why,
with the weekly reported stories of medical misadventure and bungling, the health penny still has not dropped for Kiwis
that something is amiss with our socialist healthcare system, that we have a structural problem demanding a structural
solution, and the structure of that problem is Nanny State.
The quandary lay in the contradiction of our 'die while you wait'health system being common parlance, and readily agreed
to as truth in conversation on the street, in the dairies, and even from the beds of our hospitals, yet the suggestion
of then removing Nanny was to be met always with aghast consternation and the inevitable 'but surely there will be
bodies in the street' debate. I put it to you the answer to understanding the why of this distance between our words and
thoughts can only be the pervasiveness in our lives of haggard old Nanny State.
For while we Kiwis, in pursuing matters of our bleeding hearts, voted ourselves into a Brave New Socialist World,
Nanny's very first operation was a calculated series of medical misadventures which has ended finally with her stitching
up our mouths on the rack of the Electoral Finance Act, but that more significantly began lower in the anatomy, taking
out the testicles. With them gone, so also is our courage to face the facts of our enslaved reality. Nanny has
throughout kept up her ministrations with liberal injections of welfare, free health, free education, and cultural
grants, drugging us to acceptance of the comforting Huxleyian dream that we can afford to turn off our minds from the
necessities of life, for Nanny will look after us, from cradle to grave. Yet, again and again, stories of the health
sector in disarray are telling us just the opposite, intimating what the true facts of reality are: that Nanny's
actually a Savage, begat a well meaning Savage to be sure, but like all brutes is only good at looking after herself
anymore, business class, on our money, and little patience for our individual fates, or dosh left over to encompass
running a twenty-first century health system to any professional state.
Right to this very election year, whereas the Soviets simply shot their dissidents at dawn, Nanny passed anti-smacking
legislation to finally emasculate us from our own children and our future, while all the time most cynically keeping a
firm hand whacking our behinds whenever we were found wanting by Inland Revenue - wanting, that is, to hold onto the
proceeds of our efforts. And of course she has well mastered the craft of using just enough of the booty to mollycoddle
us still further and further unto death, while keeping us alive, just, at a sub-mental stage of suckling at the system
that feeds us, too scared to pull out the tit hooked in our upper lips.
And no denying, it is not easy, a weaning, now we are this deeply in. Like leaving home for the first school camp, all a
bit scary, unknown, beyond the bonds of mom or dad - but of course we know how that first taste of freedom ended - we
had a load of fun, enjoyed life with all its extra dimensions and depth, got that 'look' from Lucy Layme that bespoke
another world, did all the stuff that OSH no longer allows, and all the while, the old world didn't end. Whereas,
perversely now this Nanny State has infected us to the extent a child never need leave home, mom instead simply leaves
him there alone while she drinks her DPB at the pub, or punts it on the bingo. Which leads surely to a brave diagnosis
of the growing preponderance of youth violence in our society. If Nanny keeps stealing from honest working men and
women, and uses the stolen spoils as bribes and rewards for doing nothing other than procreation then pretty soon for
far too many amongst us, nothing will carry value at all, including property or life itself. Thus, go to any A & E on Friday night, and there you'll find the inevitable result of our tired old Nanny State, a thuggery of bleeding and
boozed boy racers, closing the circle, ready to begin the castration anew. For how could they possibly pay for their
medical care?! Surely, 'there'll be bodies in the street', right?
And what do we hear from National? Nothing that is going to help by extracting the State from a health solution. Am I
alone in thinking that party was far better when it had a bit of Brashness to it? I could see 'a party' then, as it can
only be, sitting atop an integrated philosophy, but I can't any more, as under General Key they have allowed themselves
to become lost behind the ethical fog of war being fought this election year, where the first victim has been Freedom,
her backbone snapped in two at the sight of voter free will, and the indecent unchaste haste to say anything, do
anything, to ensnare it. Flip-Flop John is so lost behind the mist, he can't even bring himself to say the current
Speaker's junket around Europe is an outright abuse of taxpayer money. (I'll give you a clue Flip-Flop: it's in the word
"junket".) And as that junket has come before my pen, it should be noted that Mr Hide, speaking from fond memories of
his junket in South America to learn the Tango, has given support for this, and all such junkets, which are apparently
'all about building relationships overseas'. I understand Tui Beer are to begin using just this line in their next 'yeah
right' marketing campaign.
From all of this, for me there is only the single solution left. I believe that Libertarianz, by taking a scalpel to the
State, are the one party that can give New Zealand back the testicles to start fixing this whole mess properly,. That's
why I'm giving them my party vote, so they can get rid of free health-care, because as the Soviets found to their
surprise, and then their demise, this individual can't afford it anymore. Next time you don't go walking in the evening
in a street near your home, because it is too dangerous, you might also ponder the price you are paying, and whether you
want to carry on.
ENDS