On The Subject of Education Again

PJTV has a video of a large demonstration in Washington DC, against Obama’s proposal to cancel a school programme similar to that recently hard-won in Los Angeles.

A few points I’d like to note about this, apart from obvious that the teaching unions connect this with the objections to the LA scheme.

Each pupil on the scheme costs the government half what a child not on the scheme costs. Even so this costs money, because in a sop to the unions bad schools do not lose funding when they lose pupils – they are in effect paid for pupils no longer there. This is probably why it is the only such scheme in the US that has not triggered general improvements in the local schools (as has the similar Swedish system).

People still proclaim their love for Obama, despite opposing his policy (DC is administered by the Federal Government). That really does bemuse me, when he has done nothing beneficial for them. Obama said he would keep the scheme going if research showed it working, which it does. He is willing to go back on that for a union – so who can now deny he is a socialist?

Obviously the NUT opposes the Conservative’s similar policy for the UK. We shall have to see what arguments and slogans they come up with. The best slogans are succinct but point clearly to sound arguments, and ‘Put Kids First’ seems to fit the bill to counter the unions.

On The Subject of Education …

This is the response of parents in LA to poor schools, on Reason TV. Demand choice, demand ‘charter schools’, self-administered state schools. These sound identical to official Conservative Party policy, the policy that convinced me I could support Cameron despite other reservations.

Note that the teachers’ unions just don’t get it. They simply do not understand why this is popular, why it has worked in other places, nor do they understand that the choice is not theirs to make. They have no legitimate say, apart from their say as parents if they have children in school. Their choice is where they are willing to work and on what terms after this decision has been made.

Notice also the disingenuous debate. One person, I can only assume in the teaching union, criticises the idea of freedom of choice because the term was used by segregationists. What possible relevance does that have, apart from dishonestly linking demands for freedom to oppression? Really sickening.

Update: I have just noticed that one of the signs held by a protesting teachers’ union member says “Our Schools No Privatization”. Well actually they are not your schools are they? They belong legally to the state, and morally to the mass of parents reliant on the schools. I am glad these are taking back control.

Image Over Substance

This time it’s Obama, not Blair or Brown. In fact it appears that Brown deserves some rare praise, for disagreeing with Obama over the announcement of an Iranian nuclear facility discovered by French, British and US intelligence.

The story suggests that Obama delayed the announcement in order not to “spoil the image of success” of UN disarmament talks he was chairing. You know, spoil the image of success by admitting abject failure. By actually giving an accurate assessment. By being realistic and facing the truth.

What on Earth is the point of the image of success? Are the people of Israel going to be comforted by being told that there aren’t any nuclear weapons targeted at them, if later someone admits that there are and Obama knew all along? Are they going to be comforted if they have the image of safety as those nuclear weapons fly towards them?

Sarkozy’s comments on Obama’s naivety make a lot more sense now, although I have always considered him both naïve and more interested in perception than reality. I have described him as an American Tony Blair, and that is not a compliment.

Excellent Reporting From Honduras

Pajamas Media is a fantastic organisation, and PJTV continues to impress me. Much as I have nailed my own colours to the mast on Honduras and it is in line with PJTV’s editorial line, I am still pleased they managed to provide balance in their reporting from in the country, if not in the headline.

A new-media organisation that can afford international reporting is an interesting development, and should worry the traditional media. Of course it should also worry the Democrat Party, considering the editorial line of the media with which they are used to dealing and the editorial line PJTV takes.

So This Is Reset

Of course we are starting to see the great results of the promised break with Bush's foreign policy. It appears that break consists of playing up to dictators by allowing open diplomatic contact and allowing their representative to visit, while revoking the visas of representatives of the constitutional government of a democratic state.

We have seen Obama give in to Russia’s absolutely illegitimate desire to retain influence over her near neighbours and so offend most of central Europe. we have seen closer ties sought with dictatorial regimes in central America – especially Cuba and Venezuela. Obama managed to personally offend the leader of America’s most reliable ally, and while that leader is an arse he is our arse, it is up to us to offend him. He is also peddling a soft line on Iran, following the Jimmy Carter school of diplomacy that worked so well there before.

Before Obama’s election his opponents pointed out his lack of experience, especially in international affairs. His supporters responded, bizarrely, that his opponent’s prospective Vice President was inexperienced (despite having more executive experience than Obama himself). We can now see who was right.

If it can’t have Obama’s support, Honduras needs all the support we can give.

Hat tipped to Hot Air.

ACORN Roundup (updated)

There are rumours that suggest there will be more Giles/O’Keefe videos from more ACORN offices. I will keep a look out and post anything new that comes up, especially if it gives any more insight into ACORN’s increasingly dubious claim that the pair was turned away from '”dozens” of ACORN offices.

For anyone who has been interested in the dirty dealings at ACORN, the Washington Examiner has a roundup of stories going back to February.

It shows that ACORN is about so much more than helping people to set up their child prostitute slavery empire and avoid paying taxes. It’s about not paying its own taxes, exploiting employees, failing to file accounts, demanding those sub-prime mortgages that got us in this mess (demanding them now, that is; of course they demanded them during the boom years and helped trigger the whole issue). Hey, to get the full impression you’ll have to look at the link.

Phil Kerpen is rather dubious that ACORN’s culpability in the sub-prime loan catastrophe will be exposed by the commission investigating why the recent economic problems came about.

Big Government, who launched their site by breaking the recent ACORN scandals, has a good ponder about the whys and the wherefores. Of course it all connects with political correctness, and the distortion of values inherent in politically-acceptable (but in fact utterly contemptible) attitudes to poor people of minority ethnic identity.

The most interesting thing about this satire? The wall belongs to Shepard Fairey, who designed Obama’s ‘Hope’ poster, and didn’t charge for it (in the process probably breaking election funding law, but by the time anyone noticed Obama was in charge). Someone is clearly connecting Obama’s campaign and ACORN.

Jay Leno also sees the humour. Although not as good as the Jon Stewart video it is still well worth watching.

Update: lots more at the New York Post and even the Washington Post. However it appears that Obama has f-all idea what's going on.

Remind You of Anyone?

It kind of reminds me of the New Labour spin machine. Although I always thought of Obama as a US Blair, this bit sounds more like the hyper-sensitivity some of Brown’s lot have shown, and the bullying of McBride, although they might have learnt from Campbell too.

Post Racial America

Seeing the silver lining

There was not a lot for ACORN to be proud of in the last week. They very quickly lost a lot of money and influence that there is a strong argument they should never have had in the first place, let alone after evidence of vote rigging last year.

However the Weasel Times and Stoat Intelligencer has a great take on the story, the positive side for ACORN’s public image. So Obama’s supporters are finally embracing his claims to a post-racial America!

Corruption in Left-Wing Pseudo Charity (updated 11:30 16/9)

There has been an undercurrent of grumbling about pseudo charities (non-profit organisations which are largely funded by government and use a significant proportion of those funds for political lobbying and campaigning) in the right-wing and especially in the libertarian blogosphere. Mostly the complaints are about political influence and the waste of tax-payers’ money.

In America they appear to have a problem that is at least a couple of orders of magnitude beyond that. ACORN (Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now) has been shown to have been willing to assist importation of children for the purpose of sexual slavery, for profit with the aim of political campaigning. Assistance went as far as advising how to buy a brothel and to cheat the taxes on the money earned, by claiming the child prostitutes as dependents. ACORN then requested a donation.

Really. I am not kidding. Tax evasion. Mortgage fraud. Children. Slavery. Sex. Selling actual children for sexual gratification. Then claiming tax benefits because they are children. Then using the money for a political campaign.

This happened in three different states. It could possibly be worse if they start advising on how to hide the bodies once they are too old to work, but I am not sure how else it could be. Yet there are rumours that the people exposing this have something devastating to release today. WTF?

To paraphrase the article linked above, once is a bad apple, twice is an unfortunate coincidence, thrice is systematic corruption resulting from policy.

There are two things that really strike me about the response to this.

Seven senators, six Democrat and one independent, voted to carry on funding ACORN.

This has not been a huge international news story; even in the US it has been remarkably quiet. Below is what the BBC considers to be world news and Americas news at 14:00 today (click to enlarge World News).

ACORN is an organisation that has strong connections with Barack Obama which looked like having significant political influence with the Democrats in power. They were at one-time a client of Obama’s. They helped elect him, in many cases breaking electoral law, in other alleged cases breaking employment law. He had arranged for them to work on the national census (risking a constitutional challenge, which should be a big deal to a former constitutional law professor). He had arranged for them to be in the stream for government funding that was potentially to total several billion dollars.

Is Patrick Swayze’s sad but not unexpected demise really more newsworthy? Is the entirely predictable anger of Islamic fascists really more important for us to know about than a charity supporting child sexual slavery in the USA? Can you imagine the headlines if Halliburton or any other organisation with real or alleged connections with Bush had been caught on tape giving illegal advice? Three times.

Update: note I did not mention which party’s candidate ACORN thought would gain from political donations they were advising on the laundering of. Do I need to?

Update: a fourth video has been released, of a similar nature, filmed in California. It’s a good one though, naming politicians, ACORN employee offering to kill anyone exposing the brothel, suggesting violence against the underage girl, admitting killing her husband. It’s … wow, just watch it.

One ellipsis here hints at more videos to come …

Oh, and it appears that Acorn was breaking the law even operating in Maryland where the first video was shot.

Update: Hot Air has more on the embarrassed silence of the media.

Update: The co-founder of ACORN Wade Rathke, has responded, claiming that this is a “…fake issue”. My response warranted a new post …

Thanks to Instapundit for some of the links.

The Importance Of Opposition

Why I doubt the wisdom of consensus politics

Life is easy for anyone who has power or authority if no-one questions their use of that power. Life is extremely difficult if alongside power and authority there is effective opposition.

However without effective opposition then good decision making on difficult or controversial matters is almost impossible. Arrogance and ignorance dominate if the only voices heard are in agreement. That is why the term ‘yes-men’ is so pejorative. Any decision important enough to be taken by government is also important enough to hear and judge the reasoning for both (or indeed all) sides. To listen requires at least some level of doubt.

The Conservative Party seemed at one time to recognise this, and when Margaret Thatcher was seen not to be listening to those who disagreed with her she was removed. New Labour only ever cared about power, and silenced internal dissent ruthlessly while despising the opposition. For most of the time opposition was weak, and Labour took full advantage of that weakness. That is why so much New Labour legislation has had unintended consequences where they have been incompetent, or consequences that were not those the authors claimed to be striving for.

Barack Obama never had effective opposition before he entered the race for the White House. He was a Chicago politician in the Democrat Party, which not only has all-but-guaranteed office but a party machine of legendary ruthlessness and corruption. Even in his work as a law professor Obama did not have the usual academic opposition, for the simple reason that he appears not to have published anything. He lectured, but there was little to challenge what he taught.

During campaigning Obama did see opposition, but once he was the Democrat candidate the media shielded him from and effective scrutiny of his policy (or lack of it) and political history. When he did see any his response was petulant, aggressive and ignorant. Obama wanted to silence opposition, not listen to it and response, and he or his agents have often used his skin colour to do so, accusing anyone who disagreed with him of being racist however strong their argument.

Once in power Obama did not anticipate opposition, with Democrats holding the House of Representatives and a filibuster-proof Senate majority.

However opposition to Obama’s policy out in the real world has been so consistent and vocal that it has had practical influence. The massive changes he wanted to make to the healthcare system in the USA are unlikely to pass in anything close to the form he wanted.

How did Obama respond to the debate about the issue ion his latest major speech? As Power Line notes in an excellent article he called it bickering. Now this is one line in a long speech, but I see it as the most telling. Along with many other attacks on his opponents it shows that Obama does not understand the importance of debate, the vital role played by debate.

In addition the Power Line article highlights several passages in Obama’s speech where he claims the opposition is lying when it seems he is the one being dishonest. While the bill might not have death panels or give free coverage to illegal immigrants the results are the same. British experience with NHS tourism (people who are not entitled to care coming to Britain just to get treatment) and the decisions of NICE suggest that Power Line is right.

The Power Line article also shows how useful opposition could be if Obama really wanted to improve healthcare (as opposed to help his socialist backers). The debate has brought up many ways of improving healthcare, such as opening state markets, tort reform and decoupling insurance from employment, that would certainly improve health and be supported not only by Republicans but most importantly by the people.

In his election campaign Obama claimed to want that consensus politics that I so distrust. In fact what he wanted was for others to agree to his ideas, he didn’t want to listen to theirs. I am glad in a way that he does not want consensus, glad he has not reached out for a cross-party back-room deal. It has energised his opposition; the health bill has been studied by opponents while proponents admit to not having read it.

Even better his opposition is within the people, it is a grassroots movement, whatever socialists say. The Republican Party has so little to do with the effective opposition that it has been wrong-footed. It has not taken advantage and realigned itself with the protesters, many of whom are non-aligned or even Democrat voters.

However it is a pity he didn’t use the opposition, listen to those opponents.

The demands for consensus politics must be resisted. Any action of government should be challenged by intelligent, reasoned opposition. Then it is far more likely that new legislation will not only have the intentions stated by proponents but it might actually achieve those intentions as its sole consequence.

TV Documentary Lies To Steal Presidential Election

No it was not Obama’s election, in fact they were not successful. However Bernie Goldberg has further proof that CBS deliberately lied to try and influence the close Presidential race in 2004.

It has long been known that Dan Rather presented documents on the CBS documentary programme 60 minutes that seemed to show a senior officer’s criticism of a young Lieutenant G W Bush, suggest that he went absent without leave and support accusations that he failed to fulfil his obligations to the Air National Guard. The accusation was that he was a slacker, who was trying to avoid being drafted to Vietnam by joining the ANG and avoiding duties where possible, protected by his father in the Senate.

Of course it turned out that the documents were fake, and there the story ends for most of the news media, an embarrassment brushed over.

Well it turns out that not only did Lt Bush not shirk his duties, not only did he specifically volunteer to go to Vietnam (others with more experience were chosen instead), but that Mary Mapes, the producer of that episode of 60 Minutes, knew at the time it was made that he had volunteered. She had been told on more than one occasion.

This is really very serious.

I was no Bush supporter (although knowing more now I am relieved Gore and Kerry lost) but neither did I ever subscribe to the ridiculous ‘idiot’ or ‘Hitler’ memes. It was always known that election was close, and Vietnam was important. The media painted Kerry as a hero to help his cause (although his record was suspect while he was there, and he told lies about atrocities once he returned).

The Democrats were trying to paint Bush as a coward to contrast, and the 60 Minute episode was widely quoted in the press to support that; it could easily have changed the election result. Mary Mapes was a known ‘liberal’ as the Americans put it. It appears she produced a programme that she knew all along was advancing a lie, in order to influence an election. That is shocking, even for the modern news media.

What is even more widely relevant is that this information has been available for several years, and the US news media do not want to know. They will not tell the truth.

Background For Those Unfamiliar

This incident brought Charles Johnson’s Little Green Football (UPDATE: link removed as Charles Johnson has descended into insanity, and I am not willing to direct people to his creepy blog) libertarian blog to national (and to some degree international) media attention, when he challenged the documents and proved that the document below, dated 1973, was almost certainly produced on Microsoft Word (the animation compares the 60 Minutes fax, and identical wording written in Word with default fonts and paragraph settings), and could not have been written on any known typewriter available in 1973.

How Sick Can They Get?

I am not sure how to put this, as it is … stunningly crass. Ace of Spades is reporting an NRO post that a writer at the left-wing Huffington Post has said of Senator Ted Kennedy’s career that Mary Jo Kopechne would “… [maybe] feel it was worth it”.

There goes the left again; I said Senator Kennedy had plumbed the depths and continued on for fathoms, then less than four hours later those left manage to go even further than their mentor. Even I, who have few illusions about socialists often being unpleasant and self-righteous people, am truly stunned by this.

Ted Kennedy’s Sick Sense of Humour

I really cannot believe this. Not sure how to express my stunned astonishment. I first saw this on Small Dead Animals, which linked to Jules Crittenden, but I really had to listen for myself as I could not believe what he was saying. I really thought that Jules Crittenden was having a dig at Kennedy, that nobody would be so crass, but even when you think Democrats have plumbed the depths, they go a few more fathoms.

On radio station WAMU, American University Radio, Katty Kay interviewed various people about the Senator, including Edward Klein. All are fans of Kennedy and Klein edited the left-wing New York Times and was foreign editor of the equally biased Newsweek. You can listen on Real Audio or WMA, but it gets tiresome quickly.

If nothing else then download it and skip to the 30:24 point. Apparently Ted Kennedy liked Chappaquiddick jokes; he liked to tell them, and would ask people if they had new jokes. Jokes about the young woman who had died because of him, and who he had abandoned to her death in order to save his own career.

Not only did Klein think it was an appropriate story to tell in a pro-Kennedy interview, but he thinks it is “…just the most amazing thing”. Not only that but the other Kennedy groupies don’t say anything, it appears that none of them see anything wrong in that picture of Kennedy.

I’ve heard and told plenty of sick jokes; in any business where death is a constant concern it happens. I have never imagined any rational man could delight in jokes about the death he caused of an innocent person, let alone a death that occured in such disgraceful circumstances.

White House Chilling Free Speech?

If you are not American then you might not know about Glenn Beck, a presenter of a comment programme (opinion rather than news) on the Fox News TV channel. He claimed that President Obama is racist, and now Color of Change have organised an advertising boycott. More details are given in an LA Times blog post, indicating the great flaw that Beck's ratings have improved dues to the boycott.

Color of Change is a group apparently formed out of a racist, partisan lie, that George Bush had not helped black residents when Katrina struck. In fact a higher proportion of whites in New Orleans were killed, and the Federal Government could not legally act until asked by the (Democrat) Governor. Color of Change supported the Jena Six (black students who beat a white student “…into a state of bloody unconsciousness”). So Color of Change is basically a pro-black racist organisation, and part of the race industry.

Whether Beck’s charge that Obama is racist is justified or not it is fair political comment. Obama himself set the bar high, by suggesting that only he could be a post-racial president. I think there is a good case that he has been racist in his campaigning and some of his comments as president, but that is irrelevant as Beck’s programme is opinion, not news, Beck can make his case and others can argue it.

So how does the White House come into this?

It appears from the LA Times blog that one of the founders of Color of Change is Van Jones, Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation to the White House. Leaving aside that his appointment despite his links to a racist group is more evidence of Obama’s racism, it appears that a White House advisor is attacking the free speech of an Obama’s opponent.

This is highly suspect. Did the White House ask Mr Jones to start this campaign? If not, and given the way this looks, why did Obama not ask him to either distance himself from the group and disavow the campaign or to resign his post?

For someone supposedly so clever and politically adept, Obama makes an awful lot of unforced errors.

Hat duly tipped to Instapundit.

Most Succinct Answer to Ted’s Sycophants

From Ace of Spades via Small Dead Animals, regarding Senator Edward Kennedy:

“If they’re going to talk about Camelot, then we get to talk about The Lady in the Lake.”

Update: too many people even on the Right fell for Ted Kennedy’s charm, his name and his power, so I was not looking forward to the eulogies. Most were as bad as I expected, David Blackburn's in the Spectator Coffeehouse not much better. However it seems that far more people than I expected saw through him. Read the comments under that one; the phrase ‘as popular as a pork pie at a bar mitzvah’ springs to mind.

Dehumanising the ‘Other’

I have been highly critical of the race 'equality' industry before. Reading a recent case of torture, rape and murder again brought its pernicious influence to mind.

Via Instapundit I came across an horrific story of a terrible crime in Tennessee. The crime itself is sufficiently covered in that blog post and the stories it links, so I will only recount the barest details relevant to my point.

A young couple, Chris Newsom and Channon Christian, were taken at gunpoint. He was tortured and killed , she was tortured, raped and killed over a period of 24 hours. During her captivity the young men involved left the house where Channon Christian was trapped and went about their daily business before returning to repeat their crimes. During this time at least one woman was present in the house, probably more than one, and knew that Channon Christian was there, although with no direct involvement in the crime.

Katie, the blogger who posted the Mamapundit story linked above, suggested that there was no evidence that  race played a role in the crime. I think that it is possible that on one level this is not about race, not about blacks killing whites per se.

I think that on some level this is about young blacks killing people of a different race, and how identity politics that make it increasingly likely that one race does not identify with another. The ‘equality’ industry has a vested interest in emphasising differences, in pulling communities further apart.

I don’t think that is why the men carried out vicious crimes. That was evil. What I think it explains is how they could be so sadistic, how they could go about their normal lives in between, and even more clearly I think it is how Vanessa Coleman, the woman who admitted to being in the house, could be there yet do nothing for Channon Christian.

Vanessa Coleman has been told over and again by the race industry, by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, even by the Democrat Party, that she is a black first. She has been told that whites are different and don’t care about her, in fact that white people are responsible for her problems (of course to socialists Miss Coleman certainly is not responsible, nor are her parents). With all that propaganda dehumanising both Miss Christian and Miss Coleman, why should Vanessa Coleman care?

I have written about the logical conclusions of the race industry, and these aspects of the case are, sadly, not entirely surprising to me. There are better responses to racism, and they can be very promising. We just need to defeat the lies behind Critical Theory before a rational response becomes normal.

Racist Left

I have often argued that describing a political party or an individual ‘extreme right-wing’ because they are racist is wrong, it is a slanderous propaganda that the Left themselves have come to believe. Yesterday Reason Online had an article about the history of violent racism in the American Left.

That is far easier to prove in the US than in Britain. While Britain was in difficulty coming to terms with the beginning of mass immigration of non-European people, a Democrat Senator was filibustering (talking out) the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Now it is possible to object to rights legislation and not be racist, regardless of what the left will tell you, but Senator Byrd was a senior member of the Ku Klux Klan, an organisation formed in 1865 in part to serve the interests of the Democrat Party.

In the 1920s it was the Republicans who were trying to legislate against lynching, and the Democrats who prevented that legislation. Please listen to Nina Simone, and ponder on the utter evil that can make legislation against lynching controversial.

The Ashbrook Centre article goes on to argue that many of the current policies of the Democrat Party when it was written in 2002 harm blacks more than whites. Those arguments transfer far more readily to the British Labour Party, which has remarkably similar policy aims and political tactics, even if the political climate means each achieves different results.

The most practical racism still existing in free nations, discrimination at work, is a form of protectionism which fits much more readily with socialism than free-market capitalism. In the UK, where most of the support for the left comes from inner cities and unions, recent immigrants (who tend to live in cities and work more cheaply than natural-born workers of equivalent skills) are far more likely to come into conflict with Labour supporters than Conservative ones. That is why a lot of the support for the BNP is in areas where Labour is losing core support.

The extreme left, both internationalist socialists, the communists, and nationalist socialists from German Nazis to the BNP, have had strong racist tendencies. The Soviet Union was anti-Semitic, as well as racist against citizens who were not ethnic Russians, especially non-Slavs. China is today racist against those not of Han extraction.

So never believe it when you see the Left equating racism with the Right. At the very least we have proved here that racism is as much a factor on the Left, I would contend that the Left has historically shown far more racism.

Update: one thing I failed to include is that more on the left than the right (self identified) claim to dislike or hate Muslims according to a poll on the Muslims Against Sharia website. While this is not itself racism, it is bigotry (note they dislike Mulims, not extremism or Islam) of a nature often caused by racism.

P.J. O’Rourke Rocks

Reason TV has an interview with P.J. O'Rourke. The first part is largely about cars, both as the American dream and in relation to current politics. The rest of the interview is far more wide-ranging, and he speaks a whole lot of libertarian sense, in the Dan Hannan way that agrees no taboo and would have the left howling in self-righteous outrage.

I do recommend it. Hat tip to Instapundit.

No Secret, No Revelation

The Daily Telegraph has a story today headed “Senior Tories' links with Republican NHS-bashers revealed”, or should I say ‘non-story’ because it says nothing of any substance at all. The headline is pure propaganda.

Not only is the article about Atlantic Bridge, a political discussion group that does not appear to be secret, so it is hard to see why the headline claims to ‘reveal’ the links, but there is not even any attempt to claim that the Conservative politicians involved even discussed healthcare with the American members of the group, let alone agreed with their dislike of socialized medicine.

The only British politician mentioned talking health with the Republican members of the group was Daniel Hannan, and his views openly expressed and coherently argued on US television are hardly a revelation [update: it appears to be that Fox’s editing misrepresented even Hannan’s views. The media do not stand up well]. I agree with him, but there is no evidence that any top-rank Conservatives do.

Why will “… the views of Mr Campbell and others … raise eyebrows …”? They are mainstream views in the USA. They are only considered so controversial this side of the Atlantic because of left-wing hysteria at any mention of the NHS closing down the debate. News media such as the Telegraph should be resisting this hysteria, and allowing a more mature discussion.

It seems that while the country distances itself from Labour the Telegraph is moving ever closer, and this story in particular is poor journalism.

The NHS and Professor Hawking

There has been a huge fuss in parts of the US left-wing blogosphere and commentariat after a dumb comment in Investor’s Business Daily, suggesting that Stephen Hawking would not have survived under the NHS. For those Americans not especially familiar with scientific academia it is an understandable error – he ‘speaks’, after all, with an American accent (which he chose to keep when offered a new English-accented speech synthesiser, as he by then identified with that voice).

It seems some of the howling criticism is far more flawed than the original article, which at least had a valid point despite the erroneous example.

Hawking himself, an old leftie, makes a ridiculously claim that he “... wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS”, but no apparent attempt to justify that assumption.

Ezra Klein claims that the IBD was telling lies, a truly inane suggestion; if they had known Hawking was British then they would never have published the article. It is not as if there was any chance of the error slipping by unnoticed!

Yes, the article does over-simplify the calculation NICE makes of the value of extended life or improvement in quality of life. However nuanced it might be, that calculation is still made, and the monetary figure given is roughly correct. The inclusion or exclusion of nursing care is irrelevant to those whose life (or quality of life) is dependent on drugs or surgery, and they pay the same into the system. Who is to say they should suffer?

The wonderfully-named (and it appears otherwise sensible) Donklephant* suggests that talk of rationing is an intellectually-bankrupt scare tactic. Here is where my tale is told.

I was earning in total roughly £4-6000 below average wage (depending on weather, luck and economics). I was employed part-time, paid for time I worked, so I could also work self-employed in other capacities. Therefore I was only paid as and when I worked, and simply could not afford to take time off.

I hurt my back. I could not physically work more than an hour or two in my employment, and legally was unable to work at all in the role I was hired for self-employed. I had a choice, which was to wait six weeks to see a consultant, then an indeterminate time (by previous experience a modest three weeks in that area of the country, but no guarantee) for physiotherapy, or pay for a consultation and physio, a total the thick end of £500, which I did not have spare.

Of course I paid; what did you think, I could afford to drop my pay by 70% for a couple of months?

What is that but rationing? Waiting is still rationing, whether the patients rationed out of play recover without treatment, give up and accept chronic illness, pay for private care or die. That is still rationing.

The final insult was the VAT on part of my bill (I needed an assessment to prove I could do my job, and although treatment is VAT-free that was not), 17.5% going to pay for people paid more than I to receive healthcare I could not have.

This might be only one example, but in order to destroy the entire left-wing basis of the NHS there is only need of one counter-example. How can anyone possibly justify charging me tax to pay for the NHS under those circumstances?

*Donkey = Democrat, Elephant = Republican, for those less familiar with US politics.

Update: the Telegraph has an excellent article on the NHS with reference to US healthcare.