Free medicine is a form of slavery

Yes, I know that ‘free’ medicine is a misnomer. Or at least it would be if we lived in a sane world.

However, in the world we do live in, ‘free’ means nationalised. And nationalised medicine means that the state oversees transactions between patients and doctors, using public funds to pay for them.

Thus ‘free’ doesn’t mean we don’t have to pay for medical care. It actually means we have to pay more than we would if medical care weren’t ‘free’.

The money the state uses to pay for medicine comes from our taxes or, less directly, from promiscuous borrowing. The latter produces a high inflation rate, which is an income tax by another name. And taxation is a reliable instrument of state control.

Thus, ‘free’ medical care only serves to increase state power over the individual, which makes the term a glossocratic lie. It reflects the state’s powerlust, not its concern for public health.

That medical care can be used as an instrument of tyranny has been demonstrated by every political state in history, not least by Nazi Germany. Reading about Hitler’s medicine, one can’t help noticing parallels with today.

Firm believers in nationalised medicine, the Nazis showed how it could be used for crowd control. Like today’s bureaucrats, they emphasised preventive medicine, with nutrition featuring prominently in their health propaganda.

Every German had a duty to look after himself, thereby prolonging the part of his life when he could continue to serve the state. Likewise, in today’s state medicine the need to relieve financial pressures on the state’s purse can be neatly converted into a blanket dictate on citizens’ lives.

Conditioned to accept the edicts of the state, Britons don’t cringe upon hearing from yet another health official yet another admonition of their dietary habits. “And exactly what makes this your business?” is a question seldom asked. But if it were asked, the truthful answer wouldn’t be far removed from the Nazi rationale: the good of the state.

(Almost 40 years ago, when I moved to Britain from the US, I argued with a good friend of mine, a doctor who in those days wouldn’t hear a critical word uttered about the NHS.

I was fuming about the law making it illegal not to wear a seatbelt. My argument was that, by not buckling up, I risk harming no one but myself, and it’s not the state’s business to protect people against themselves.

But it is the state’s business, countered my friend. If you get hurt, you’ll cost the NHS a lot of money, meaning the state has a right to insist you protect yourself. That, I objected, is the strongest argument against the NHS I’ve ever heard. My friend thought I was crazy.)

The Nazis waged an anti-smoking campaign that would be the envy of today’s Britain. It was the Nazis who first established the link between smoking and lung cancer, and hence banned women from smoking (allowances had to be made for men, most of whom were in the foxholes). As a result, lung-cancer statistics in Germany continued to be better than in other Western countries for a couple of decades after the war.

Like many other forms of research, this proceeded from the starting point of an axiomatic assumption, in this case that smoking had to be bad because the Führer was good, and he didn’t approve of lighting up.

Chemical additives and preservatives were roundly castigated by the Nazis, wholemeal bread was depicted as morally superior to breads made from blanched white flour. And neither Wes Streeting nor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was even born yet.

Like today’s bureaucrats, the Nazis promoted vegetarianism (practised by Hitler, Hess and many others), and Göring personally banned medical experiments on animals.

Since the Nazis were godless, animals were to them not principally different from humans, and were in fact superior to some. Hitler loved his Alsatian Blondie more than any woman in his life; in today’s Britain veterinary medicine is organised better than the care of humans.

Of course, Nazi doctors were involved not just in preventive medicine but also in such less benign pastimes as eugenics and enforced euthanasia. It’s comforting to observe how medicine in today’s West is inching in the same direction.

Euthanasia, in particular, is custom-made for our statist, godless modernity. One can’t open the papers these days without reading a thinly veiled lament about the burden placed on the fragile shoulders of state medicine by an ageing population.

This is a paradox, for tireless propaganda of healthier ‘life styles’, coupled with advances in pharmaceuticals and hygiene, is designed to help people live longer. In reality, it’s designed to increase the power of the state but, when medicine is used for that purpose, one can’t be had without the other: life expectancy will grow.

This creates a vicious circle: the state uses medicine to advance its own good by tightening its control on citizens’ lives; but as a corollary to this, the state hurts itself by creating a multitude of old free-loaders who do nothing but sap the state’s resources. Euthanasia is the logical way out, and never mind the effete arguments against it based on the outdated notion of the sanctity of human life.

The British are unhappy about waiting lists at hospitals, caused by a chronic shortage of hospital beds, but they miss the point. State medical care doesn’t need hospital beds to perform its principal function: control over people’s lives.

In fact, fewer hospitals were built in Britain during the first half-century of her nationalised medicine (the NHS was launched in 1948) than in the 1930s, hardly the most prosperous decade in British history.

As modern states of every variety have demonstrated, in order to be truly successful, state control has to extend to people’s private lives, not just public activities. Glossocracy can achieve this end by itself – for example, by brainwashing people into believing that there exists a valid moral distinction between driving after two glasses of wine or three.

Very much in the news at the moment is the pathetic state of Britain’s defence. Consecutive governments have systematically sabotaged defence spending while at the same time pumping more and more money into welfare.

It’s true that, at £330 billion a year, our welfare spending is five times the size of our defence budget. Yet somehow the NHS is spared similar comparisons, even though its annual cost of £242 billion is only a third less than welfare expenditure.

Divest those two culprits of just 10 per cent of their loot, and we could double our defence spending. But you don’t believe that will ever happen, do you?

All such anomalies have the same origin: the nature of the modern political state wielding glossocratic tools like equality, humanitarianism and fairness to put its foot down. Such a state lives or dies by its power to dispossess large numbers of people as a means of supporting, and therefore effectively enslaving, the growing numbers of parasites dependent on the state for their livelihood.

However, bureaucrats willing to empower such a state at the expense of defence are after fool’s gold. A disarmed Britain can easily fall prey to foreign predators who can replace the power of our bureaucrats with their own.

Any number of dystopic scenarios spring to mind, and you can easily think of your own. But any such scenario will have the same basis: the state’s urge to impose servitude on the people, and the people’s readiness to exchange their real freedom for illusory security.

Welfare and nationalised medicine are perceived as factors of security and therefore cherished. Defence of the realm, on the other hand, is a factor of freedom and therefore spurned. And the state is happy to go along, knowing that its power will continue to grow.

Both the people and the state are on a losing wicket: the people will surrender their liberty to the state, the state will eventually relinquish its power to a stronger foreign state.

As Ben Franklin once put it, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” And neither is exactly what they end up getting.