As a student at university, it’s easy to be aware that academia is dominated by the left. After all, it is the voices on the left we hear the most. Added to this, a Conservative Party that does not look very conservative at the moment and almost like they are out of ideas – just take a look at the agendas for the Conservative Party Agendas for 2023 and 2022. But over the summer, two academic conferences of note took place, which should bring a glimmer of hope to conservative students.
The first, held at Churchill College at the University of Cambridge from the 6th to 7th July 2023, on British Intellectual Conservatism: Past and Present. This was organised by ResPublica and the University of Public Service. The second, held in the House of Lords from the 14th to 15th September 2023, on Margaret Thatcher: Her Life, Work, and Legacy. This had been organised by two research centres at the University of Hull. The first research centre was the Centre for Legislative Studies, which is led by Lord Norton of Louth, the second by Dr. Matt Beech who leads the Centre for British Politics.
The conferences, naturally, had different focuses but as a participant at both – and having had time to reflect on them, there are four things I found in common. These conferences were full of enriching academic thought, they were both thought provoking, provided a space to be reflective, and to think ahead to the future. In the current climate when it looks as though the Conservative Party will be unsuccessful at the 2024 General Election, both conferences highlighted the need for a better vision.
The two conferences in their own way provided a means to push back against the narrative we see that the right are out of ideas. Rather, the conference on British Intellectual Conservatism: Past and Present consisted of several panels, from Conservatism Today to addressing Free Speech and Conservatism. There were also two panels dedicated to two of the great leaders of the Conservative and Unionist Party, a panel on the Age of Churchill, another on the Age of Thatcher. All in all, the conference did exactly as the name of the conference said it would. A key focus of the conference was on the works of Roger Scruton and bringing his ideas, which may have been forgotten to the forefront. There is much to be learnt from this conference.
For the conference on Margaret Thatcher, many ideas were shared. The main takeaway raising the issue that politicians today do not have a long-term vision. Many who praise Liz Truss and her allies say “she did what Thatcher did” but what people fail to recognise and remember: Thatcher spent many years developing her ideas with a team before those ideas became policy.
There are lessons to be learnt from the conferences. It is people, no matter their role in politics, whether they work in academia, policy or aspire to be an elected representative, who need to take a step back. There are many great people we can learn from, but the problem with the world today is everyone is looking for the next great thing. The rivers of free-flowing conversation of ideas from conservative academics and politicians needs to be opened up before anything else can happen.
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Digital Censorship Is Now the Perfect Crime
The combination of free speech and the internet should provide an unprecedented democratising effect on public discourse. After all, anyone with a decent idea can now reach out to millions of people worldwide, regardless of their wealth, respectability or social status. The potential for innovation is endless.
And yet, looking at the world today you would be hard-pressed to find a clear exemplar of this democratising effect. It appears that new technology has also created new forms of censorship. Control of public speech is now so subtle-fingered that it’s often hard to recognise as censorship or even detect when it’s happening at all.
To understand this new phenomenon, it’s worth taking some time to consider how social-media algorithms work and why they’ve become so important to our society.
Ideas spread through social networks and the fastest social networks are those found online, managed by large corporate platforms like Facebook, WeChat, Twitter and YouTube. These sites all curate what’s seen by the user into a ‘feed’. In order to create the feed, posts are ranked automatically based on numerous statistical parameters: the number of views, likes, comments and shares; the ratio of these quantities to each other; the upload date; the topics and tags assigned to the post; and so on. Network spread is accelerated by the number of followers of the poster and of the commenters and sharers. So far, this is common knowledge – but the algorithm doesn’t stop there.
It’s a trivial piece of programming to scan each post for keywords and assign a score to the post according to its content. Some words are coded as ‘negative’ or ‘positive’, or linked to different emotions like anger, outrage, joy, pride and so on. Based on this score, you can assign a different behaviour to how the social network treats the post. The post might be ‘throttled’ and shown to a disproportionately small number of accounts or it might be ‘boosted’ and shown to a large audience.
Instead of emotions, algorithms can also score posts on their political alignment with a range of contemporary pieties, such as racial or social justice, lockdown advocacy, or climate change. Individual accounts could then be given scores based on the type of posts they make, ensuring that the most egregious or inflammatory posters are quietly and gently smothered into irrelevance. Everything is automatic. No humans are involved. You, the poster, would have no idea whether censorship was happening or not.
The mechanism described above need not be the exact approach used by Twitter, Facebook or any other site. Consider it an illustrative example of how an engineer like myself could easily build multilayered and highly sensitive speech control into the networks of public discourse, to run a controlled speech environment that seems ostensibly like free speech.
Ultimately, all meaningful public discourse is now finely manipulated by the hidden algorithms of these social-media corporations. This is a reality of life in the 2020s. And with private companies manipulating public speech in these arbitrary and unaccountable ways, governments around the world are eager to get a slice of the pie.
Bearing the new algorithms in mind, consider how a government might suppress an idea that’s hostile to its interests. In the 1500s, the king’s men would march off to all the troublesome printing presses and intimidate the publishers with threats of vandalism, imprisonment or execution. It is against these weapons that the great Enlightenment arguments for free speech were constructed. Indeed, smashing up publishers was a risky move, creating martyrs and stirring opposition to absolute rule among the educated classes.
But in the 2020s, no such kerfuffle is necessary. State censorship has become astonishingly easy. The government need merely express its views to the management of a social-media company via their private channels, and every post sharing a particular idea will be throttled, demoted or blacklisted. Even if you can post the idea, the prominence of its spread has been hamstrung. It is thus the perfect crime, costing governments nothing, creating no martyrs and leaving opponents and their followers with paranoid doubts as to whether they were suppressed in the first place.
Different governments achieve this in different ways. The US is a world leader in invisible censorship, helped by the fact that almost all major social networks are Silicon Valley entities (enjoying close ties to the US intelligence apparatus). The most visible incidences of US censorship on social media concerned sensitive information about the Biden family during the 2020 US Elections, and the control of narratives surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown measures.
Across the pond, the EU has passed into law a Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into effect last month (25th August 2023). The law empowers a large taskforce on disinformation, answerable directly to the European Commission, to immerse itself in public discourse control and censorship on all major social networks. Twitter is required to meet regularly with this taskforce and answer to demands of the Commission regarding ‘misinformation control’ or face fines and other sanctions from the EU.
Critics of the EU will note that the EU parliament is again sidelined by this troubling new institution. And like the GDPR regulation of 2016, this is liable to become a global standard in the relationship between state institutions and the internet.
What terrible danger demands such a robust approach to information control, you might ask? The usual suspects appear in a list of disinformation trends compiled by the EU-funded fact-checking hub, EDMO:
- ‘nativist narratives’ and opposition to migration;
- ‘gender and sexuality narratives’ that cover trans issues;
- the ‘anti-woke movement’ that ‘mocks social-justice campaigns’;
- ‘environment narratives’ that criticise climate-change policies.
Each of these problem issues is subjective and political in nature. It appears that the EU is concerned with changing the views and opinions of its 450 million subjects to match the ‘social justice’ ideology of their leadership – which is precisely the opposite of democratic governance.
The arguments of classical liberal thinkers are outdated when it comes to combating this new form of censorship. It is true that whenever an idea is silenced, the community is made poorer by not having heard its voice – but can that argument be made with the same vehemence when the idea is merely muffled or massaged into a lower engagement ratio by a tangled web of hidden algorithms? Is there an essential ethical difference between government interference with public discourse through social-media algorithms and the interference of an agenda-driven Californian software engineer who happens to work at one of these companies? Most media outlets don’t even describe this process as censorship, after all: it’s just ‘content moderation’.
Proponents of subtle censorship will point to the numerous social goods that might conceivably come from light-fingered thought control on social media. These include the suppression of enemy state propaganda, the neutralisation of dangerous conspiracy theories, and the management of violent sectarian ideology that could cause social harm or terrorism. But aside from the foiling of vague and nebulous threats, whose impact can never be reliably predicted, it is hard to see what conceivable gain comes from surrendering our right of free public discourse to unelected state organs like the European Commission taskforce.
The danger we face is that our present situation could rapidly evolve towards the total engineering of public discourse on social media. Western governments have shown an alarming desire to create populations that are docile, disorganised and progressive-thinking, rather than trusting the democratic process to produce good ideas through argumentation and open debate. Subtle censorship on social media has the potential to nudge us into a dystopia, where people are only permitted to organise around an elite-approved set of curated ideas.
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Breakfast with Thierry Baudet (Part I)
In mid-July, The Mallard was fortunate to have breakfast with Thierry Baudet, leader of the Dutch ‘Forum for Democracy’ (FVD) party in the Netherlands. We discussed his views on manufactured consent, immigration, CBDC, and climate change; and his new book ‘The Covid Conspiracy’.
The Mallard (TM): The Mallard knows your youth movement, JFVD. Their performance is very impressive. How did FVD start?
Thierry Baudet (TB): FVD began as a Eurosceptic think tank. In 2016, we organised a national referendum in the Netherlands opposing the association agreement with Ukraine. We won this referendum with more than 60% of the vote. The government, however, decided to ignore the outcome and sign the agreement anyway. That is when I decided to run for parliament.
I was elected in 2017.
It was clear from the beginning that we had substantial support amongst the young. Once we founded our youth movement, we had a thousand paying members within three hours.
We realised that people do not necessarily want to come together just for political discussion, they also want social and economic contact. That is why we organise sports events, social events, trips to the countryside, and so on.
We have an app now so people can sell products, offer services, send in job applications. We even have a Tinder function for dating so that FVDers can reproduce.
Fundamentally, we go about things with an energy which is truly different from that of any of our competitors. I denounce them in my book as ‘conservatards’ – the conservative establishment across the Western world which has become part of the deep state.
TM: The Blob?
TB: Yes. Or the Swamp. These people are afraid of speaking about any of the real issues. For example, they say ‘Sure there is climate change, we need to do something about our emissions, but let’s build nuclear power stations and not wind turbines’. Or, ‘Yes, illegal immigration is bad, but we need legal immigration,’ and ‘Yes, Covid is a big problem but let’s not do a 9pm curfew, instead an 11pm curfew.’ They accept the underlying assumptions and therefore never come up with truly different ideas.
They are unwilling to step out of the parameters set by the enemy. They are fighting a battle on the enemy’s ground, so they lose. But the price of not fighting on the enemy’s ground is to be labelled. That is how taboos work. So when you say ‘I want to leave the European Union, I do not think our sovereignty should be diminished by a supranational body,’ then you are labelled a nationalist. If you were to say, ‘It does not matter if immigrants come in legally or illegally, the problem is immigration as such. It is the transformation of our society from a cultural, ethnic, and historical point of view – that is the real issue,’ then you are denounced as a racist.
So, all of these taboos, these labels, function to protect the fundamental assumptions. If you live by them you also belittle yourself. You undermine your self-confidence; you undermine the energy with which you can bring your message across because you are not actually saying what you believe.
So, because we do not do that, unlike all the other so-called right-wing parties, we have a very special energy which you have noticed. People are happy with us, they are free.
TM: At most conservative events, there are very few women. When we attended your summer JFVD conference, it was pretty much half and half. Why?
TB: Because women understand that it is pointless to talk to people who are not willing to fight the real fight. They love men who take risks, who take pride in going their own way, taking their own route, believing in their own ideals. These are very important masculine values.
I do not see any sensible woman being attracted to the sort of effeminate bureaucrat the other parties produce. I do not see conservatards getting laid.
TM: Why do you think young men are attracted to your movement?
TB: Because men have a very hard time when they are young. Their chances of becoming financially well-off are slim. Their life is extremely difficult because of all these policies imposed on them. You are not allowed to be a meat-eater in all aspects of life. It is vital for men, especially young men, to have an aspirational goal – to be fighting for something.
TM: You want to be the hero of your own story. That is very difficult in a society which regards boys as defective girls.
TB: Boys are not allowed to play in the woods anymore, they are not allowed to be boys. It is only normal that a counter movement is rising.
TM: Talking of counter movements, what are your thoughts on the BBB (Boer Burger Beweging, the Farmers’ Citizen Movement)?
TB: Oh, it is a typical party cartel trick. BBB is a party consisting of former Liberal Party members and Christian Democrats. They operate entirely within the accepted ideological framework. That is also they are celebrated so much in the press. Nothing will change with them in government.
TM: If that’s the case, will the situation ever change in the Netherlands or Europe?
TB: The system is very strong and very difficult to break through via the democratic process – because it is not really democratic. We in the West are living in a heavily controlled oligarchy where certain groups are allowed to win elections. If a dark horse comes through, like Donald Trump, the entire system turns against him. It makes it effectively impossible to change things through the political process.
Things can change only if peoples’ trust in the system as such – and by that, I mean, the permanent political class and its media – crumbles. That is what happened when the Communist system failed in Europe. That is one scenario. The other scenario is that things will carry on as they are but that we will build a parallel society. We will be able to live in our own way, as the Amish do in America. We will be minorities in our own countries but we will survive.
TM: Is this linked to your App? What is it that your app does?
(*At this point Thierry got out his phone and showed me his app*)
TB: Here is a map which shows every FVD supporting company. We add new businesses every week. There is a commerce section where people can buy and sell goods. It has a coupon function so that you can get discounts at FVD-supporter-owned shops. It is very comprehensive. We are trying to expand this internationally so that people can organise parallel networks to help add value to themselves and thousands of others.
You see, I’m fighting on two tracks. First, the national platform to reach out to people and to wake them up to the consequences of current policies and governments. Second, I am faced with the globalist establishment from which there is no escape. We cannot avoid the fight because it is what we are here to do. We are part of a civilisation. If you run away from it, the fight becomes internal – you begin to eat yourself up.
TM: Just in the Netherlands?
TB: Across the whole world. During Covid as now on Ukraine. I find it absolutely stunning that every mainstream outlet supports NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine. There is a genuine economic and ideological cartel of the deep state which is follows decisions of the military industrial complexes.
TM: What really depressed me during Covid was that so many seemingly normal and rational people fully and wholly supported the lockdowns. People demanded that they be locked into their own homes.
TB: The conclusions that we should draw are about more than merely societal or economic costs. This is why I wrote my book. I was the only elected politician in the world to have opposed all Covid measures radically. It is why I am not allowed on television anymore. All the institutions set up which in theory create checks and balances do not function anymore. The media and every mainstream party went along with it. It was not a national decision; everything had already been decided at the international level and was merely implemented at national level through fake discussions. That is how the world really works.
This is Part I of The Mallard’s interview with Thierry Baudet. To read Part II, click here.
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Bring Back Food Rationing!
Having never experienced food rationing myself I cannot say what it is like, but I am assuming the experience is not as bad as images suggest. My reasoning is straightforward and can be put in the form of an argument as follows: (1) The National Health Service (NHS) is good; (2) Food is more important than health; therefore, (3) A National Food Service (NFS) would be good. Is there anything wrong with this argument?
Let’s look briefly at the truth or falsity of the premises, before elaborating. A supporter of an NFS, along with many millions of others, would affirm with confidence that the NHS is a ‘good thing’. That is, it is a desirable if not indispensable institution, at the beating heart of our national life, a support and a lifeline for all of us, relatively free at the point of use, providing the full panoply of basic medical services, from care for minor ailments to treatment for serious illnesses and conditions such as cancer, heart disease, broken limbs, disfigurement, deadly infections, and so on. Yes, it is currently in the worst shape it has been in for decades, to the point that in the current election campaign the major parties do not even pretend to mouth slogans such as ‘Twenty-for hours to save the NHS’, so far gone is the patient.
That does not mean the NHS is undesirable, though, does it? Anyway, just suppose it is a good thing for the sake of argument and let’s revisit the premise later. Premise (2) says that food is more important than health, and the truth or falsity of this depends on what we mean by ‘important’. Think of it this way. Although both food and health are quite basic human goods, there is an asymmetry. Without food – by which I mean adequate nutrition, not simply fasting for a bit or going on a diet – you are guaranteed to be unhealthy. But if you are unhealthy, it is not guaranteed you will lack adequate nutrition. Some illnesses make it hard to keep food down. Some illnesses deprive a person of their appetite. But these are exceptions. You can be seriously unhealthy, headed for the grave, and yet still not be suffering from malnutrition. If you are malnourished, however, you will be unhealthy there and then, with no further steps required, no exceptions to be made.
Ask yourself this admittedly remotely hypothetical question: faced with the choice between inadequate food and inadequate health (short of death!), which would you choose? I’d go for inadequate health, thinking that with inadequate food I’ll be unhealthy anyway, so why not just have ill health but at least plenty of food, hoping that I can maintain my strength and give myself a fighting chance against my illness? Again, as a general rule if you have zero food you are dead in a few months. You’d have to have a pretty rare condition – pancreatic cancer, say – to be dead in a few months. If you add not having water to not having food – and I do want to add that since I am classing food and water together when I hypothesise about a National Food Service – you are dead in a few days. Very few illnesses or combinations of conditions kill you in a few days – maybe bacterial meningitis or necrotizing fasciitis.
So yes, of course health is important, but food is just that bit more important. That said, by ‘important’ in premise (2) I am packing a little more into it than the asymmetry just outlined. I also mean that if there is such an asymmetry, then however society is structured so as to make health care readily available should be similar in key respects to how society should be structured so as to make food readily available. This is how the conceptual connection between ‘good’ in (1) and ‘important’ in (2) should be interpreted. (I could split the argument into sub-arguments to make this crystal clear, but it’s not necessary).
Now, does our conclusion (3) – ‘A National Food Service (NFS) would be good’ – follow from the premises? If so we have a valid argument, and if the premises are true then we have our ultimate goal, a sound argument – to lapse into philosophy-speak. Well, I’ve gestured at the truth of (1) but also said we should just assume it for the fun of the argument. A full defence of (1) would come from the endless literature doing just that – defending the goodness of the NHS. I’ve argued at greater length for the truth of (2) and its connection to (1). Suppose I’ve done the job. Then how could the conclusion not follow? It must, of logical necessity. There is no escape. We need a National Food Service.
Er, do we? The title of this article refers to ‘rationing’. Actually, food rationing is really not something you’d want to experience. Nobody in their right mind wants food rationing, except the crooks who make money off it and are not subject to the rationing themselves. I think I’d rather emigrate than have food rationing – at least as a way of life. So what I really think – and I’m sure you agree – is that food rationing is not something we’d want brought back. And so the prospect of a National Food Service should fill me – and you – with utter dread. If that is the case, then we must do what we philosophers call a modus tollens: I give you an argument pointing inexorably to a certain conclusion. But that conclusion is on its face absurd. You and I won’t accept it. So we are forced by logic to deny at least one of premises (1) and (2). Having already made a pretty good case for (2), we have to deny (1) after all, contrary to the initial ‘for the sake of argument’ assumption. The NHS is not good – not in concept any more than in current execution.
Wait a minute, you might object: I’m comparing apples and oranges. There is no rationing in the NHS! But there is, I insist. True, we don’t all walk around with health care ration books with quotas of medicines or treatments printed on each ticket. But health care is rationed nonetheless, as any fule kno. You get a precious ten minutes with your GP, then you are politely expected to leave (unless things are serious as judged by that GP alone). You cannot get any treatment you want, no matter how effective or promising; it all depends on cost and the voluminous guidance of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE). Ultimately, who gets what is for the government of the day, acting on the advice of – sorry, I can’t resist – Twenty-First Century Science.™ The details of NHS rationing are there for all to see. This leads to very bad consequences for patients in a multitude of cases, with the example of breast cancer drug Kadcyla being instructive.
A critic of my argument might insist that food and health are dissimilar in important ways that undermine premise (2), the claim that food is more important than health. Recall that my argument is not just that food is prior to health in terms of human well-being, but that because of this its allocation in whatever way society allows should be the same as the way health care is allocated in that society. All things being equal, perhaps that is true. But all things are not equal, says the critic. There is a whole side to food provision that has no health care parallel. There are restaurants, gourmet dining, eating for pleasure, eating as a cultural pastime. Whereas health care is about meeting needs, there is more to food provision than simply meeting needs.
It is not clear to me that there is a disanalogy. Health care also has its niche, exotic, cultural, aspirational side. Think of purely aesthetic surgery – nose jobs, teeth whitening, skin lightening, Botox, hair removal, hair transplants, body modification, and so on. These are all far more about satisfying desires than meeting real needs. They are generally not necessary for health. The critic retorts: ‘then they are not about health care, so why are you bringing them into the discussion?’ My reply: ‘then neither is fine dining or wine tasting part of food provision, so why are you bringing them into the discussion?’ In other words, cheek filler and fine dining stand or fall together. Either both are on the table or neither are. I think it’s more plausible to say they are both on the table as quite remote parts of health care and food provision, respectively. Now, cosmetic surgery is not routinely available on the NHS, except for mental health reasons or if the cosmetic aspect is accompanied by a real functional need (e.g. to breathe clearly). This is well and good. Similarly, in my National Food Service regime, oysters and crab-flavoured ice cream would also not routinely be available (except perhaps if they were essential to nutrition!). These would have to be purchased on the private market.
The critic might try this gambit: health care, the kind of care that doesn’t just maintain health but that keeps you alive, can be astronomically expensive. People can’t generally afford it. Adequate nutrition can be had very cheaply. So people need help from the state with the former but can pay for the latter themselves. My reply is that if this point is a good one, it only favours restricting the NHS to the really expensive treatments, not retaining the kind of all-encompassing, womb-to-tomb NHS we have now. So the critic’s point undercuts their own idea that an NFS is not desirable but the NHS is. Moreover, some staple foods, which millions require for nutrition, are particularly expensive to produce, e.g. rice; these rely heavily on government subsidies, loans, and other price support mechanisms. So why not go the whole hog with food, so to speak, and bundle it into an NFS? Anyhow, the overall cheapness of food argues in favour of an NFS because it is really, truly, hard to believe that an NFS would cost more than the NHS – which is pushing £200 billion in annual cost, that is to say, about £3000 annually for every human being in England. I am having to stretch my credulity beyond breaking point to suppose that universal food rationing would cost anywhere near that much. But I have no method of estimating it. (The last I looked, by the way, £3000 would buy every human being in England a helluvalot of health insurance. Just saying.)
OK, how about the ‘black market’ objection? This says that just as we saw a lot of illegality during wartime food rationing, we would see the same the minute an NFS came into existence. And we don’t want that. In reply, this presupposes we do not see illegality as a result of having the NHS. I’m not talking about dodgy tattoo and piercing parlours or lunchtime liposuctions. I’m referring to ‘medical tourism’, where thousands upon thousands of UK citizens go abroad for medical treatment (234,000 in 2021, with 34,000 foreigners coming to the UK for treatments, stats here; gets the noggin joggin’ doesn’t it?). That in itself is legal, of course, but it is surely the case – data are hard to come by – that at least hundreds, if not thousands, of people are injured by negligent doctors, in dodgy or uncertified clinics, or by illegal procedures abroad. I am not thinking of cosmetic surgery (which is the number one reason for medical tourism) since that is not available on the NHS anyway, but rather of things like orthopaedic surgery and dental procedures (it being notoriously hard to get on the books of an NHS dentist).
It is tough to see a significant disanalogy between health care and food provision when it comes to the idea of a nationalised service – socialism, effectively. If there is none, then either we should go with food rationing or we should dismantle and privatise the NHS. As I said, I’m not a fan of food rationing and I doubt you are. I like my private supermarkets, the abundance of choice, the full range of pricing, the efficient delivery, and the reasonably pleasant shopping experience. (Things are going downhill, to be sure; thanks a bunch, America.) But that’s only the supermarkets. I live near an award-winning cheese shop, an award-winning butcher, an overpriced organic shop, and can get pretty much any food online that I can’t find locally. All in all, I can’t complain. Do I want all this to be turned into a bunch of Stalinist showrooms with tasteful lighting illuminating a few mouldy potatoes? All right already, I’m exaggerating. But you can bet that an NFS would be a sodding awful experience without end (unlike post-World War 2 food rationing, which ended in 1954).
And a privatised health service? I admit, my own experience with the NHS has been pretty positive. Our local surgery is clean, neat and friendly, the local hospital likewise, so again I can’t complain. But that’s my area. Stories abound of shoddy service: paint peeling off the walls, DNRs on anyone over 70 (at least during COVID), old people lying on trolleys in corridors for hours and days on end, people sleeping on the floor, half a day to get seen by accident and emergency, botched maternity care, murderous nurses, sepsis here and sepsis there, often woeful food, radical discontinuity of care, hospitals rated inadequate, a culture of cover-up, bullying, endless negligence payouts, bloated bureaucrats on golden pensions, and so on and on. The word on the street these days about the NHS is not exactly positive.
There is no room to rehash the endless debate over privatised health care. That said, I am not advocating for a fully privatised system anyway. Not even our private food system is without government supplementation, for example free school meals and financial assistance to food charities, not to mention government subsidies for agriculture. In a private medical system, there would be similar government assistance, safety nets, and the like. In addition, just as private food is heavily regulated so as to reduce the risk of contamination, food poisoning, and waste, so a private medical system would also be heavily regulated to ensure basic standards from top to bottom.
The worry that is perhaps most often raised is that whereas food products are commodities and hence subject to commodity pricing, many life-saving medicines and treatments are the result of decades of high-cost research and development, require intellectual property protection, and need to have their costs recouped through high pricing. The hope that I and many others have is that as long as technology progresses, prices will trend downwards and affordability will increase. This is particularly so with the mass production of generic medicines. A hundred years ago, hardly anyone ate steak. And hardly anyone had access to antibiotics. Still, there is a long way to go in light of the Big Pharma quasi-cartel, corrupt regulators and legislators (the old ‘revolving door’), and the artificial stimulation of demand due in large part to a woeful lack of government or private interest in preventive health care – the best health care of all.
No, I don’t want to stand in a queue outside a state-run food dispensary. And I want more than ten minutes with my GP. The logic of not bothering about the latter leads to not being fussed about the former, at least if my reasoning is correct. I think we should reject rationing altogether, outside of war and national calamity. If I want a National Food Service, I’ll head over to North Korea. Thanks but no thanks; I’m off to Tesco for a sirloin.
David S. Oderberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading; d.s.oderberg@reading.ac.uk; www.davidsoderberg.co.uk; davidsoderberg.substack.com. All opinions expressed are personal and not associated in any way with my employer.
