One of Hayek’s points in “The Road to Serfdom” was that a government health care service, one financed and provided directly, would lead to a dictatorship. Nothing produces more giggles on the left than this very idea, that “free” health care would make us serfs if not slaves.
Except, of course, it’s true:
Didn’t you used to be matey with Nick Cohen for a while, back when he was sounding kind of halfway-sensible? Looks like he’s reverted back to type.
The same is true of welfare. Brown tried the same trick with tax reliefs, but I don’t think that worked as well!
They want to be slaves. They really do.
He was more fun when he was drinking, yes….
People love a politicised rationing system.
But they act surprised when it gets rationed. In a political way.
Nick Cohen’s recent diatribe was fucking deranged. Funny how these liberal types come up with societies dystopian beyond the dreams of your average conservative. We didn’t even have to ‘scratch’ him to reveal the tyrant.
Rob
” We didn’t even have to ‘scratch’ him to reveal the tyrant.”
Anyone who wants state control over almost anything is a tyrant somewhere under the surface. They all believe things would simply work better if they were in charge. Things never do of course, and that is the first step to the gulags.
And what’s worrying is Cohen is normally quite sane by the standards of the Left. Of even more concern is that it takes almost no leap of the imagination to think that the Coming Corbin government will begin implementation of almost everything in this article, and with Johhny Mac likely to rig the electoral system to preclude a non-Corbinite government, concepts like compulsory veganism are literally just round the corner. Dark times in the UK……
Nick doesn’t want to be left out of being a player in the coming Corbyn tyranny.
You can be a small c conservative on your own. The principles of personal responsibility and freedom do not require endorsement by a group. Socialists, on the other hand, need to be social. Maybe that’s why they form ever-smaller cliques, each practicall indistinguishable from the next. When Nick Cohen did ‘What’s Left’, calling out leftist hypocrisy over various issues, he was reviled as an apostate. What should have caused mainstream socialists to examine their problems they dealt with it by casting Cohen out. He’s never been happy since. Maybe he hopes to pick up a sympathetic social group with this latest modest proposal.