They are Closing the Hospitals in Britain

When I read James Bartholomew’s book
The Welfare State We’re In I didn’t really believe his claim that
the British National Health Service (NHS) hadn’t built a single hospital since it
was formed in 1948, and that mainly it had been closing hospitals in its 50 years
of monopoly health care provision. I resolved to keep an eye out for corroborating
evidence.

And of course who can forget the Canadian hospital in The Barbarian Invasions
that has a whole floor closed down—because of what, short staffing or something?

So here’s the story I have been waiting for. It’s from the London Spectator,
written by Ross Clark.
The NHS is busily closing small “cottage” hospitals all over Britain to cut costs. And
of course they are doing it in a stealth campaign.

The 16 in-patient beds at Bradford-on-Avon Hospital,
Wiltshire, were closed with three days’ notice in early August,
again supposedly as a temporary measure, in reaction to staff shortages.
Yet last week West Wiltshire Primary Care Trust
announced that they will not be re-opened.

Many of these small local hospitals were built centuries ago, funded by benefactions
and local subscriptions. They were, if you like, charities. But
they were “owned” by the whole community. In 1948 they were given to the NHS. Now
the NHS wants to close them.

Those of you that believe in single-payer health care might want to think
a bit about the closings of the cottage hospitals in England. When there
is a single payer then you had better expect that the local needs of local communities will get lost in the
shuffle of centralization and rationalization.

Because in a rational world it doesn’t make sense to have a little hospital
in Podunk, Iowa, or in any small community. Why, a small 20-bed hospital is just as inefficient as
a one-room schoolhouse.

China's Emerging Middle Class

When we can take a moment from the delicious pleasure of bashing the other guys on the Iraq
war, the evil Bush, hurricane Katrina, and right-wing ideologues on the U.S. Supreme Court, we often
turn to thoughts of China. What will happen when China takes over the world in 2050?

Here’s a little look at the emerging Chinese middle class, the “xiao zi” or “little bourgeois”
that is beginning to fill China’s bursting cities. Writes
Trudy Rubin,

Wander through some of Beijing’s many malls and watch crowds of young Chinese
chatting on cell phones, roaming in and out of Nine West, Mr. Klein, Givenchy,
Rolex watch stores, Starbucks, Pizza Hut or the local cineplex, and
you realize Americans have paid too little attention to the world’s biggest story

That’s hardly fair. We’ve been delighted to read about China’s amazing progress from the
miseries of the Cultural Revolution.

Of course, the xiao zi like this young woman, Jie, understand that they are living in the middle of a remarkable change.

"When my father was 30, he couldn’t imagine owning a car or an apartment or going
abroad," Jie said. When she was a child, her family lived in one tiny room, assigned to her
father by his state-owned employer. Jie and Yeu are now pushing 30; they own a two-bedroom flat,
a vacation home and two cars, and can afford to travel overseas.

But of course, nobody knows where China will go from here. That is the great question that is
coming up. What will the Chinese do with their power and their wealth half a century from now?

One Small Step for Academic Freedom

Last week Ohio state universities took a small step towards academic freedom for their students. As
David Horowitz writes,
“The Inter-University Council of Ohio has reached an agreement
with Senate sponsors of the Ohio Academic Bill of Rights (Senate Bill 24) to implement key
principles of academic freedom
in all public and private colleges and universities in the state.”

It’s a pity though that the Ohio media doesn’t seem to agree. According to Horowitz they spun the
agreement with Ohio State Senator Mumper as “Colleges deflect `Bill of Rights.’” But the Academic
Bill of Rights advocated by David Horowitz merely repeats words used nearly a century ago by the American
Association of University Professors. Today the university professors want to claim that Horowitz’s
Bill of Rights will chill free speech. But, again, as Horowitz writes:

the clause in the Mumper Bill that would bar professors from bringing their
academically irrelevant political prejudices into the classroom is taken almost verbatim
from the American Association of University Professors’ own classic statement on academic
freedom: “Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject,
but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which
has no relation to their subject.” (AAUP
1940 Statement on the Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure.)

So why are the professors claiming that an implementation of their own statement on academic
freedom is in fact a violation of academic freedom?

Germans in a Funk

The German voters spoke clearly to their politicians in Sunday’s election. They are frightened. They
are fed up with the status quo but they are afraid of change. They are fed up with 5 million unemployed
but they don’t want to give their leaders a mandate to do anything about it.

That was clear from the reaction to the half-hearted trial balloon for a flat tax to replace Germany’s current complex system of income taxation. Chancellor candidate Angela Merkel brought flat-tax advocate Paul Kirchhof onto her staff and the SPD leader Schroeder jumped all over her. Obviously the German voters agree with him, since the substantial lead for the CDU/CSU coalition evaporated in the weeks after the flat-tax trial balloon.

It’s all so sad. The nation of Kant and Einstein is cowering in a cave like Wagner’s Fafner the dragon.

All in all, you could say that the Germans have had a rough time for the last century. Despite being the most advanced country in Europe they have been cursed with a second-rate political class. Bismarck was too smart for his own good and Kaiser Wilhelm too obtuse. The Weimar years were a lost weekend and
Adolf Hitler was, unfortunately, the most brilliant politician of the twentieth century.

A new aged seemed to dawn when economist Ludwing Erhard jump-started the economy in 1948—when Germany had nothing left to lose—and sparked the twenty-year Wirtschaftwunder. Then the Social Democratic Party returned to power, followed by the corrupt CDU Chancellor Kohl.

Well, the Germans invented the welfare state, so it is understandable that, with pride of ownership, they should be reluctant to admit its dreadful flaws and try Anglo-Saxon supply-side economics instead. We are not talking rocket science here. People should have responsibility for their own lives, as much as possible. Government can’t be trusted with the welfare of the people. Tax rates should be low and government spending as low as possible.

But the Germans are not yet ready to take the plunge. And that’s a shame.

Blair Dumps Kyoto

Whose side is British Prime Minister Tony Blair on? For years he’s been toeing the line on global
warming and providing verbal support for the European approach, the carbon emission limits of the Kyoto
accord. Now, according to
James Pinkerton, he’s changed his tune.

At the Clinton Summit in New York recently he said he would be “brutally honest.”

"My thinking has changed in the past three or four years." So what does he think now?
"No country," he declared, "is going to cut its growth." That is, no country is going to allow the
Kyoto treaty, or any other such
global-warming treaty, to crimp -- some say cripple -- its economy.

OK, fine. There’s nothing like taking a dose of reality, every now and again. So what policy does
Blair recommend now?

"What countries will do is work together to develop the science and technology...
There is no way that we are going to
tackle this problem unless we develop the science and technology to do it."

Er, isn’t that the policy of the Bush administration? To deal with global warming by developing
technology rather than by imposing unrealistic caps on carbon emission?

San Francisco Earthquake was Worse

Was Hurricane Katrina the worst national disaster ever? According to
Donald Luskin the San Francisco earthquake was worse.

It was worse in terms of total damage, worse in terms of looting, worse in terms of violence, and
worse in terms of federal and local government miscues.

The performance of first responders in 1906 was as dubious as it was in 2005.
Half the San Francisco policemen and firemen walked off the job, leaving whole districts
virtually unprotected and unpatrolled. The U. S. Army, which had two infantry divisions
stationed right in the city, could not coordinate emergency response with the mayor.
Mayor Schmitz and Brigadier General Funston despised each other.

So that’s all right. But the behavior of the victims was just as bad.

The looting and other civil violence in New Orleans that shocked the nation was
far worse in San Francisco. Crowds looted homes and stores as the spreading fire approached
and engulfed them, ransacked hospitals for drugs, and cannibalized the few belongings of the
tens of thousands of refugees. Most shocking of all, some of the worst looting was done by
Army and California
National Guard troops, especially in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Wow. Now let us think. What was the similarity between the United States of 1906 and 2005?
What could it be? Of course! Evil Republicans controlled the White House and Capitol Hill!

Hero of the Hurricane: Wal-Mart

Out of the miasma of blame and media bias in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, one American institution
is emerging from the cloud of ruins like a firefighter emerging from the ruin of the World Trade Center:
Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart was first with a monetary contribution to disaster aid. Wal-Mart had pre-positioned
goods like generators and Pop-Tarts (!) at its distribution centers. Wal-Mart announced it would
open mini-Wal-Marts in the disaster area to distribute vital food and supplies to disaster victims.
And Wal-Mart already has nearly all of its stores in the disaster area back in business.

Even the left has taken notice, but only to slap Wal-Mart with the usual canards. In The Nation
Liza Featherstone compliments Wal-Mart for their response:

Thank goodness, then, for Wal-Mart, which immediately sent 1,900 truckloads of
water and other emergency supplies to the afflicted. The company has also contributed $17
million to
the hurricane relief effort, and more than $3 million in merchandise.

Then she slips in the shiv:

A company capable of operating in such a coordinated, humane way should do
so not just in a disaster but every day. There is no reason Wal-Mart could not operate
in an equally streamlined, well-organized manner to make sure that labor laws (on overtime,
child labor, discrimination) are followed. There is no reason its impressive resources could
not be marshaled to remedy the daily, ongoing disaster that
so many of its workers face: low wages and inadequate healthcare.

Then she goes too far.

According to the conservative wingnuts at the Wall Street Journal editorial page,
the superiority of Wal-Mart’s Katrina response shows that the private sector is simply more
effective than the government. Well, yes, oddly enough, when you starve a government by draining
its resources and
electing officials who don’t believe in it, nothing seems to work.

Er, what exactly do you mean by people who “don’t believe” in government? You mean “belief” like in
religion? And what exactly do you mean about a government starved for resources? Which government
did you have in mind, exactly?

The commentary of economics professor
Thomas Sowell is perhaps a little more reliable.

[The] question is what set of incentives has the better track record for
getting the job done -- and especially getting the job done promptly when time can be
the difference between life and death.

The country does not have one dime more resources available when those resources are channeled
through government. The resources are just handled less effectively by government and dispensed
in an indiscriminate way that encourages people to
continue locating in the known path of predictable disasters.

What we saw after Hurrican Katrina is that individuals and corporations were able to act, and did act,
much faster than governments at all levels. That ought to teach us a lesson, even the faithful
believers in government at The Nation.