But it's not eeeeeeequal!
Government is ultimately a coercive organization, and giving it more power necessarily involves increasing it's police activity. Those clamoring for more government should understand that it will be the military or police supporting their objectives. And if they are neutering these bodies while giving them more responsibility, their tactics are not aligned with strategy, a recipe for futility.
This is actually the same reason why I am so sure that Canada's idiotic health care system where buying health care services in the free market is a crime
will collapse within next five years or so, as surely as the Berlin
Wall collapsed when it was no longer possible to enforce it and
everybody saw that the grass really was greener on the other side.
As
lines and waiting times keep growing longer in an overburdened system
(just a few days ago I saw a poster ad by Ontario nurses, complaining
that there is a shortage of nurses and they are overworked --- hmmm, I
wonder where they all vanished?), the patients' incentive to buy health
care services increases. How exactly did you plan to watch over doctors
and patients so that you could catch them? Pretty soon this reliance on
the free market would become so widespread that to enforce this silly
law, you would need to have a totalitarian surveillance state beyond
even the wildest dreams of leftists. Without such a system, you'd
probably have a better chance of catching an illegal music downloader
than a patient who goes to a doctor for some operation and pays him for
his services himself. And every doctor who offers his services in the
black market in this manner creates an incentive for the other doctors
to do the same to supplement their incomes. In numbers, there is safety
and anonymity, and it sucks to let others gather all profits.
And
even if such a totalitarian surveillance system were able to find
lawbreakers, I don't think that some guy who is sick and in pain and
therefore wants treatment now
instead of waiting for months in line for the government-rationed
services makes a very good defendant from the prosecutor's point of
view. One public trial like that and that's that about that for the
strictly government-rationed one-tier system of health care.
I hope the Canadian socialist health-care system collapses, but I think it might just slump into the health-care system of the old Soviet Union, which was socialized to outward appearances, but actually ran on bribery. A semi-free market like that is not optimal. Since participants (especially consumers) fear denunciation to the authorities, who may punish the them for market transactions (if only by extorting more bribes) they are more suspicious, and cheating becomes common. Lack of advertising also hampers such a black market.
Posted by Anonymous | 12:24 PM