Care of the elderly as a universal state benefit funded from taxes is a grab too far. Getting old is not, of itself, an illness, though it manifests itself as illness as the body declines. An image of a universal health service (and a very particular model of such a universal provision, at that) has been taken and applied to a different phenomenon - aging and dying.
We all know this will happen to us; it could be argued that quite a lot of life is preparation for death, at least after the first conciousness of decline in strengths and capacities arises. Yet we are told that so many have been in denial of the obvious that they have made no provision whatsoever for their inevitable need, during the long years of their competence.
The old have had longer than anyone else to get organised - longer than anyone else to prepare, in every aspect of their being, for the end of their lives. And many have done so, supported by family, economic preparedness, and by whatever faith in which they have chosen to live their lives so far. Agreed, in our common humanity we cannot abandon those who are without provision now. This has always been so. Throughout our history there has been support from the charitable community for the old who have found themselves unprovided for by misfortune or from social change.
Although lack of provision now is on such a scale, encouraged by attitudes and ideologies that have pretended to replace the need for individual responsibility, it is not a role for government.
Government's role is to provide an environment conducive to saving and pension provision; to insurance against the unexpected and against misfortune. Not to create yet another giant occasion of moral hazard and its accompanying emptiness of spirit, and lack of commitment to one another.
Socialism failed. It failed completely. Failed to the level of building walls to keep its sad societies imprisoned, its subjects from running away. And when they tried it, shot them as they fled across the fields of fire to reach its last perimeter walls and the capitalist democratic societies on the other side. Socialism produced subjects who spied on one another, even within families, who betrayed every last shred of decent human solidarity, their faith and belief systems mauled and disfigured by the demand for atomistic allegiance to the socialist state. Socialism failed to produce decent living standards, and in its failure produced the end of decency in all sorts of behaviour.
We have already a socialist planned monolith disfiguring our economy, failing and infecting the society it is supposed to serve, in the National Health Service. A National Care Service would be a death blow to our open society.
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3 comments:
More and more it seems to me that the NHS is some kind of club that functions for the benefit of its employees. "Clients" are just a bloody nuisance, and if they are old, they can take the tablets and shut up, or alternatively they can allow the surgeons to experiment on their bodies.
The beginning of the Utopian socialist state began with the introduction of the welfare/nanny state. The demise of the welfare/nanny state may occur very shortly considering the UK's parlous economic situation, which will cause the demise of socialism. This may herald the dawn of a new democratic era based on self-reliance and personal responsibility and then it may not. What ever does eventually emerge the transition will be both painful and traumatic.
A government that is needed is one that will wean the people of Britain off dependency without it feeling like cold turkey. Anyone know a political party up to it, I don't.
And Labour 'claim the narrative' of being universal health providers, L. When the older view that you go into a hospital to die and that hospitals are places to be avoided ought to have attention paid to it in the present situation.
I don't want the demise of the welfare state, A. It has been around from long before Labour even existed, since at least the last quarter of the 19th century in a recognisably 'state', ie universal form, and of course for centuries longer in a local welfare provision form; we will always need social care provided to supplement individual responsibility when misfortune or change strikes some.
It's the socialist style of welfare provision, the pretence that only under big state high tax underclass creating policies can welfare provision exist at all that makes me see red (sorry).
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