Below is an outburst of feeling from a friend in the USA. I cite it because it reflects some of my own frustration about the way my opponents think it reasonable and fair to compare 21st century standards now we have the welfare state with circumstances in the 19th century. The implicit suggestion is that no improvement would have taken place without the welfare state.
Very well done. You scored a number of very good points and came across very well. Your opponents were the same old tired-and-familiar establishment.These types of debates tend to degenerate into the comparisons of the shortcomings of voluntarism in 1906 with the shortcomings of state welfare in 2006. It is so important to emphasize how rapid and dynamic the rate of improvement would have been under voluntarism over the past century. For example, from the same starting point in Germany forty five years of progress produced in the west the Volkswagen Golf as well as a full range of Audis, BMWs and Mercedes, and in the East a state monopoly on automobile production produced ...the Trabant.
Virtually any western German who wanted one could buy a car on demand, but the Trabant was like the British National Health Service, only available through rationing and a long waiting list. Doesn't that make people stop and think, just perhaps there is something systemic, endemic, about compulsion versus voluntarism (These words reshape the debate away from government versus private, by calling the government by its true distinguishing characteristic.) which makes the former fail?Also the old canard that these days everything is too complicated and sophisticated for the private sector to handle. A moments reflection will reveal that in fact it is the free market which handles complexity and variety best, the government can only do big stupid clumsy things. In particular, governments grew out of the need/desire to wage war.
I don't think I could handle living in England any more. The ruling class would drive me nuts. They are so goddarn naive - and smug with it.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in General
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