Lovely! Very well-done! …

fertility or pregnancy related treatment – they aren’t complaining about vasectomys and prostate care.

The last is an illness. The second last is a lifestyle choice and no, I would not want my money to pay for that either. There is a simple way for a man to avoid causing a pregnancy and I don’t have to pay for him not to have sex. Complications of pregnancy, like illnesses like prostrate problems or breast cancer, are completely unlike fertility treatment. Complications of pregnancy et al are insurable risks, infertility is not. Nobody has a right or a necessity to have a child. And certainly not at someone else’s expense. As to whether any of these have any relationship to issues of self abuse, like smoking, drinking or drug taking, that comparison is utterly unfathomable.

I don’t drink, smoke or do drugs so don’t cost the nhs in that way ( nor do I complain that some people do ) -when I need support for pregnancy it should be there – even if the all knowing Jock wouldn’t need it.

The NHS needs to be protected – the problems do need to be sorted out – it is a big job but not impossible. Fear should not drive us in to the arms of private companies there to simply take our cash.

I am not in fear of losing the NHS although I do think it would be a really stupid thing to do to get rid of it. We’ve always known it’s had its faults and it will never be perfect, what thing is? Even Aneurin Bevan, its founder knew that. He said “We shall never have all we need. Expectations will always exceed capacity. The service must always be changing, growing and improving – it must always be inadequate.” (Toynbee, P. 2008) #WeLoveTheNHS wasn’t created so people could declare their undying love for the system. I am almost sure that most people who support the campaign could find more than one thing to complain about it. It was, as Graham Linehan its creator said, made “simply to counteract lies from Fox news and the like.” (Linehan, G 2009). What makes me mad is that people across from the pond are suggesting that our healthcare system is somehow floored for trying to afford everyone the same level and rights to health care as the person they’re sat next to in the waiting room. I personally think our system does more for human rights than theirs. At least our waiting lists and lack of service is due to weight of traffic through the doors, assessment based on need, and lack of funding and not simply because our paycheque can’t afford it.

In the U.S. if your company pays your insurance then if you get sick and can’t work then, no work means no insurance so you are essentially screwed because you have no way to pay the medical bills. That would never happen in the U.K. It would be interesting to check the figures to see how many people immigrate to the U.K. for healthcare. The U.S. should take note that yes we have the NHS but if people aren’t happy they can always get their own private healthcare as well. Which is fine for them and I am sure that if I was faced with the waiting list for treatment I may well stump up the cash to go private but for the whole thing to be private I think is inherently wrong. Look at all the other services we privatized and how they’re doing. Let’s just hope you don’t have to catch a private train to the private hospital otherwise you might find the waiting list to get on one of them is longer than the procedure you are going in for!
I agree that our healthcare could be better but if it is compared to say a country such as the Dominican Republic then it is doing spectacularly well. I once heard whilst on holiday out there that if you didn’t have private healthcare (which almost all the population did not) then all you could afford and the hospital would give you was aspirin. That is disgraceful.

Those who say they love the NHS are not uncritical. If you think of the NHS as a sibling, spouse or offspring then those who are supporting the ‘we love the NHS’ campaign are merely doing what any family member would do. Even though you find that sibling, spouse, offspring annoying at times, they have odd habits like trimming their toenails in bed, picking their nose or do things which annoy you like answering back and saying out past curfew, you still love them because when you don’t have to worry if they’ll be there to support you. They’re there unconditionally. The NHS is like that. It has its faults but if you get hit by a car tomorrow you know that you won’t have to check your pockets for change to pay the ambulance man to save your life.

Linehan, G. (2009) Granham Linehan’s Twitter Page. [Online] Available from: http://twitter.com/Glinner [Accessed on: 25th August 2005]

Tonybee, P. (2008) F or all the hyperbole, Bevan would have approved of this. The Guardian. Tuesday 1 July. [Online] Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/01/health.nhs [Accessed on: 26th July 2009]

since when has there been a re-nationalisation of public transport? if you are complaining about trains or buses running on time then you have to complain to the private companies who own them. if you forgot they were all privatised many many years ago. But maybe you are right for showing us that when the private sector get hold of something then the first thing that happens is the price goes up and the service goes down. And whilst you are waiting for your late train or bus you might want to consider how much money in bonus’ are being to paid to the top end of these companies who are making you wait in the cold. was the system better nationalised? No. But it was cheaper.

If you had any sort of liberal sense and concept of logical argument, you might have been able to see that I raised this as a debating point rather than as a position I hold to absolutely.

Quite obviously this is really a reductio ad absurdum, posing one very extreme and limited definition of freedom, the “property is theft” one, which lay at the basis of the most extreme and simplistic forms of socialism, to pose against your equally extreme and limited definition of freedom.

You complain in absolutist terms at one acceptance of norms for the problem of scarce goods and resources, that involving the existence of the state, but you have no problems with the other, that involving acceptance of past property deals even though this may be greatly restricting on real freedom for those who have nothing. You seem unwilling to reach a balance, arguing that anyone who isn’t 100% with your definition of freedom is 100% against it.

Charlotte calls this position “liberalism” though it is not the position of the Liberal Democrats, nor was it ever the position of the Liberal Party. I might have been more willing to move to a position closer to yours if I had some sense that you had answers to the fears I have raised, but I have no such sense. Your inability even to understand the points I am making shows that.

So what is yur solution to the problem of scarce goods and conflict? In fact “our” system is not so simple really as you make out there. What it does is establish a set of norms for making a claim defensible in an arbitrated hearing.

The norm of allowing the first person who takes something to which nobody else has previously laid claim out of its natural, unowned state and made some profitable use of it to claim right of first ownership is one that does go a long way back in liberal thought too – it is not peculiarly libertarian.

Any other system, that does not at least offer a set of those basic norms against which an adjudication may be made (and it should be added that such a claim is not as straightforward as it seems – if someone has taken somethging out of nature, claimed it for itself, and then abandoned it through lack of use, it is distinctly possible that someone else could lay claim to it and win), and which, as implied by your message, says that it is okay for someone else to take and use anything regardless of who may claim ownership of it, is at the very least condoning outright theft, and at worst, communism.

Despite whatever you may think others on here were calling you, I had never thought of you as either a kleptocrat or a communist. But if you do not have such norms then it seems you might well be.

Like I say – you are very welcome, in a libertarian world, to join and seek to invite others to join some communist kleptocracy voluntarily if you like, in which no firm ideas of private property prevent anyone taking and using anything else, but don’t please foist it on us.