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January 22, 2005
The "great" institutions myth
Many of the "great" institutions which interfere in our lives, dictate our choices, affect human relations or diplomatic alliances, our health care (in Britain), our education system and content, our armed forces, and several other "institutions" were set up in the latter years of the 20th Century. It would be true to say that, if you were to attempt to set any of these up today, you would definitely not do it this way today!
Examples abound from Pension Schemes that were supposed to be cash cows without any invested capital and relying on the belief that the contributing workforce would continue to grow, ergo, you could pay pensions out of contribution income, to mammoth bureaucracies needed to "administer" all the "institutions" set up to deliver these supposed "benefits". The United Nations is another example. Set up in 1947 to act as a forum in which civilised nations could resolve differences and try to prevent conflicts, it became a pawn of the cold war and increasingly it has become a forum through which dictatorships and despots have been able to frustrate efforts to relieve poverty and raise freedom. More recently it has taken to espousing all manner of "causes" which, when examined, lean ever further to the left of centre politically and promote the socialist myths that if you throw enough money at anything, if you strip the rich and the hard working of their earnings, it can be re-distributed to the benefit of someone else - usually a Swiss Bank owned by one of the world's "impoverished" Dictators.
Examining the monolithic institutions set up in the 1940's and 1950's in the "liberal" West, one finds increasingly that these are frequently the root cause of many of the problems. Our education system has broken down, it does not deliver well trained and useful citizens, primarily because, somewhere in the 1960's, it fell under the thrall of the left-wing ideologues who decided that it could be made fair, that the intelligent should be strapped to the not so bright so that "fairness" and "equality" could be shown to be being applied. The result is that, at best, all state schooling is mediocre, excellence is penalised and discouraged, and the growing tide of bullying, usually a sign of social and mental inadequacies in the bully, are everywhere on the increase. Look across Europe and you find an alarming rise in bullying everywhere, that selection and discipline have been scrapped in favour of "equality" and "fairness". Inevitably it means that any hardworking child who outshines the less able is singled out as a target - often by the incompetent teachers whose training has not equipped them to deal with the bright kids, only with the less able ones.
The much vaunted National Health Service is another such institution. No one now dares to do what is essential - scrap the entire thing and start again - instead they tinker and throw endless pots of money at it, eventually resorting to the desparate measure of hiring "spin doctors" to tell us everything is working, when all the evidence says it is failing in almost every sphere. This morning I listened to an emminent Professor describing his shock at the discovery that the NHS, which we are told has been a leader in the field of "palliative" care, doesn't actually provide much! As the professor said, the NHS sees its mission as "cures" and anything that cannot be cured is shoved into the back wards and left to get on with dying. Many of its victims then die in excruciating pain, alone and without the support they need, simply because the monolithic culture of the great socialist experiment does not recognise the need. They're dying, so why bother, it costs money to look after them, so the sooner they die, the better, is the attitude since the running of the NHS became a "management" preserve rather than a medical one.
No one, I venture to suggest, would today attempt to set up a health service which attempts to provide cradle to grave health care in this way, funded entirely out of tax and promising everything from General Practice, Specialist, and even full body organ transplants! I suggest that the practical model which would be far more workable would see the NHS running the hospitals and employing a range of Specialist Physicians and Surgeons as well as the "Housemen" and women, nursing and cleaning staff. Employers would be required to provide employees with access to medical insurance and GP's, and other specialists would be operating out of private practice. A central council could be established to regulate fees and ensure access for all to health care, with the state picking up the insurance for those on benefit or welfare and pensions. By focusing on the expensive part of the health provision, the money spent could be better targeted than it is now, where "waiting" lists are the mechanism by which various departments blackmail the management into providing funding.
So, too, with the UN and its institutions. The likes of Clare Short think of it as a "Supranational" Government and try to give it the status of a world parliament when it is nothing of the sort. It is a talking shop and nothing more. All of its much vaunted achievements and all of its organisations are funded by the Western Nations and a very small number of the Eastern Bloc contributors, Japan, and Taiwan - a nation excluded by the Socialist-supported and promoted ruling by this incompetent and largely discredited body from taking a seat in the General Assembly because they have decided that Taiwan is not an independent state. When you look at the voting on that resolution, you want to weep - it includes many of the world's worst despots and dictatorships - and our own "wunderkindt" Government of the UK. OK, so it got us a trade deal with Communist China; I hope Clare Short can live with the fact that she's cuddling up to one of the most repressive regimes on earth - ah, but of course, I forgot - they're good Socialists, so that's all right then.
The other problem with them all is that having been designed to meet a Socialist agenda they are now compounding the problem at every step of the way. The World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, the World Health Organisation, are all set up to deal with their own particular areas in a "top down" or "centre outward" manner typical of Socialist thinking. It is the World Bank that persuaded Third World Governments to go in for "cash crops" rather than subsistence and sustainable food production - and before anyone suggests that it is a "capitalist" institution I suggest that they take a close look at the way it is structured, managed, and governed - no "Capitalist" would ever structure a Bank that way! Much the same can be said of initiatives by WHO and the WTO who have all blundered into areas best left alone and then done untold damage to local populations, local economies and the whole concept of democratic development.
As I said in an earlier post this month, there are a number of these so-called "world" bodies, which are established the way they are and in the form they are because they were built on the socialist principles in sway at the end of World War 2. The more you look at them and how they are run, structured, and deliver, the more you are compelled to think the unthinkable - scrap the lot and start again with a clean sheet of paper in order to build something that functions properly and delivers what it is supposed to, without posing as something it is not.
President Bush declared at his inauguration that he would continue to push for the democratisation of the world, that the US would continue to strive to persuade people everywhere that there were and are credible alternatives to dictatorship. Let's hope he can persuade those in power in the west to make a start by dismantling the relics of the Cold War and the failed Socialist dream of an "international" Socialist Order run by the few for the benefit of "the masses". Anyone who has studied Marx or Lenin and the history of the Communist Empire will know that this is a euphemism for an "elite" political class ruling a proletariat whose hopes and ambitions are sacrificed and subsumed for the "greater good". Look no further than the sacrifice by the British Government, in 1946, of the 50,000 Georgian Cossacks "for the Greater Good" of relations with Attlee's "great Ally" Stalin, to see where that thinking leads you.
It really is time to start rebuilding some of these great Socialist institutions and to recognise that it is Socialism in all its many guises which is the greatest threat to the future. It does not offer equality or wealth to all, everywhere the Socialist Dream has been introduced it has resulted in oppression, poverty, and alienation of the people it is supposed to benefit. It always creates a bureaucracy, it always gives rise to a political elite, and it is always the preserve of the intellectual ideologues whose contact with the realities of a working man or woman life is, at best, tenuous. Look no further than the Cambridge spies who sold secrets to the Soviets or the current crop of cabinet ministers who are all ex-protesters, university activists, and all from privileged backgrounds and education.
It is time to bury Socilaism and move on, and a good start is to break down and rebuild the institutions which lock us into the failures of socialism so that we are not constantly hindered by the dead weight of their structures. It is time to expose the myth that these institutions are anything but a failure.
Posted by The Gray Monk at January 22, 2005 09:10 AM