The Malignant tumor ( with a benign rewrite)
A rewrite of a not so perfect post
The day after I posted the first version of this article with the title “The malignant tumor” I became exceedingly unhappy with it. It had a few hiccups, did not flow well and there were some gaping holes in the arguments. I did not know what to do. Should I just edit it? Delete and replace? Repost without an explanation? Here I am reposting, leaving the (disliked) original for comparison. I wish to start a conversation about the questions with fellow writers on Notes. Follow me there if you want to see it.
The regulatory state is the malignant tumor that is killing us
In my last post, The real cancer, I hinted to the point that I would like to describe our problems as the consequences of societal pathologies. Western liberal democracies are all suffering from the cancerous growth of oppressive bureaucracies, corrupt politicians and powerful special interest groups. They are sucking the lifeblood out of democracies creating a curious mix of communism and fascism.
What is the cause of my wife’s cancer?
Let me ask an easier question: what is the cause of cancer? Is it a genetic, environmental or metabolic disease? Is it a combination? What is most likely? Possibly a bit of all, we will never know because the system responsible for it is suffering from a terrible disease called representative democracy with layers of delegated decision making.
But before we get there, let’s look at the problems in practice. I live in Canada, that is the system I will use as an example.
The Canadian healthcare system has two aspects that are treated with religious-like reverence.
It is ‘socialized’ and egalitarian.
Socialized means that it is a centrally planned, government owned and run system that is nominally free.
Egalitarian means that it is a strictly controlled monopoly, where it is practically impossible to find services outside the essentially communist system. Offering medical services outside the system is a criminal offense.
In Canada, I do not have the right to seek out the kind of health care I see fit for my needs and in this respect, the US, the EU and the rest of the developed world is not that different. Many, like Canada, already signed up for the WHO’s new pandemic treaty, signing away our rights to make decisions about our own bodies.
Healthcare is less and less about us and our needs and increasingly about the needs of the professionals and organizations providing it to us.
Like it is with anything else, if you are not paying for it, you are the product.
Healthcare is devolving into human livestock management worldwide
Like any other communist enterprise, Canadian Health care is wrought with shortages and cost overruns. Nobody really knows what anything costs.
What this means is year long waits for elective surgeries, months for many procedures, and weeks of waiting for simple diagnostic tests. Emergency room visits are taking about half a day.
(You may want to read about my experiences in the very first post of this blog:
Dealing with the free – missing the freedom (and yes, the Xray is of my broken clavicle)
Family physicians are the gatekeepers of the system. In Canada, I cannot go to any specialist without a referral. And just like Kafka’s gatekeeper in “Before the law” they are just first in the line of ever more powerful gatekeepers.
Medical professionals represent a very powerful special interest.
Their interest is to keep their revenue high, their liability low and competition strictly controlled.
They can achieve the first through limiting the number of professionals licenced, the second through deferring some decisions about ‘standards of care’ to regulatory bodies and the third through active suppression of anything outside the existing system and paradigm.The ‘interests’ and the ‘integrity’ of the medical profession is represented by several regulatory bodies: licensing authorities and associations (labour unions) for the various medical professions.
The medical profession is beholden by the prevailing scientific paradigms which are thought in medical schools. Any deviation from it is penalized. Alternative ideas and theories are suppressed.
Any questioning of the existing system and its blatantly corrupt nature is censored.Scientific research and its direction are controlled by those who pay for it.
So are scientific publications.
The majority of the funding of the first and the revenue of the second is coming from pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment manufacturers and medical procedure licensors.
The rest of their funding/revenue is coming from sources controlled by the same people.The whole system is controlled by them to serve their financial interests.
They corrupt the politics, the education, the science, the market and even the conversation about them.The interest of big pharma is not a healthy population but a captive one.
A population that has a life-long dependence of their patented, expensive drugs with no responsibility for their side effects. The side effects are features, not bugs.
(watch Painkiller for an illustration).What threatens them is anything natural, healthy, cheap and non-patentable.
They corrupt politicians to pass laws shielding them from liability, to protect them from competition through patent laws and the banning of effective, cheap alternatives.
Since they are the largest source of advertising revenue for any mainstream media, they can corrupt them as well by penalizing them for the support of any alternative narrative.
None of this is happening by accident and none of it is unique to healthcare. We could subject to a similar analysis education, agriculture, scientific research, social security, natural resource management, the housing market, the military industrial complex, foreign affairs and even race relations.
The ultimate source of the problems is democracy itself.
Democracy is hopelessly and irreparably corrupt and I am not talking about party politics and electoral corruption. The concepts of democracy and the way it operates gave birth to whole classes of parasites that are slowly destroying their hosts. (And they have about as much respect for us as actual parasites do.)
Society
We, humans, evolved from pack animals. The pack is the biological foundation of society. It has structure, it has competition and competence hierarchies, unspoken rules and behavioural expectations, voluntary social interactions with an expectation of reciprocity. This is what living in a free society means. Cooperation, trade, mutual help, communication.
There is no absolute freedom, we are still bound by social norms, but those are seldom static and oppressive. In primitive societies the worst punishment was exile, banishment from the tribe. Morality evolved from our existence in a tribal world.
The state
The state is a different story. The state is an institution of power, or to be more precise, an institution with a monopoly on the right to use of force. In its idealized form, that power is only used to protect us from enemies from without and lawbreakers from within. We could say that we delegate our power for legitimate violence to the state.
There is a distinct difference between society and the state: the essence of society is voluntary interactions; the essence of the state is power and compulsion.
Democracy
I have a never-ending, ever repeating dispute with people who say: stop complaining, this is a democracy, this is what the people want. If you want to live in a democracy, you have to accept its rules. My answer is always no, this is not what people want, but it is most likely what they deserve.
We treat the idea of democracy as some sort of Deity. As an ideal we have to strive for.
Since democracy is our ultimate goal, the more democracy the better.
But, of course, democracy as an ideal is nonsense. An impossibility. I tried to explain this in some more detail in my post “Why Marxism”.
The short version is that democracy has two dimensions: the number of people the decisions affects and the number of decisions we choose to make collectively.
Democracy works best when these two factors are in inverse proportion.
The smaller the group, the more collectively made decisions it can handle and the larger the group, the fewer the collectively made decisions MUST be. In truly large groups, delegating the decisions is inevitable.
The aspect of democracy that enables the societal cancer is this delegated decision making.
Delegation is not the problem; we delegate all the time. We do not tell the baker how to bake the bread or the car mechanic how to fix your breaks. We delegate the decisions about the details. The only thing we want to know is how much will it cost. Delegation is fine, as long as it is well defined and you are in full control of it.
The problem with political decision making is that it is very poorly defined and we have no way to control it.
Politicians cannot do anything practical for us, all they can do is to delegate further.
We delegate some decisions to politicians
Politicians delegate to bureaucracies
Bureaucracies delegate to experts
Experts delegate to whomever pays them most
The actual providers/suppliers (a.k.a. “special interests”) do not delegate, but capture the decision making.
At each step of this process our original intent gets corrupted by the self interest of the group handling it; which is how it (our original intent) tend to end up in the hands of people whose interests may be diametrically opposed to ours.
The only constant in this chain of delegation is the razor-sharp focus of every player on their own self interest. It is never about US, it is always about THEM, and THEIR needs.
They cannot exist without us, but we are just the excuse enabling them to keep their own business going.
Politicians want to get re-elected. The illusion of power (and the perks) are irresistible.
Bureaucrats just want to keep their jobs, to get more power with less responsibility and their budgets steadily growing.
The job of ‘experts’ and lobbyists is to represent the interests of the groups that are paying them.
Decision making bureaucrats and regulators are paid by governments but can benefit greatly from having good relations with the regulated. This often manifest itself in what is described as a revolving door between the regulators and the regulated, whereby the bureaucrats end up in high-paying jobs at the business they ‘regulated’
Special interest is the corruptor but we cannot blame them alone.
It takes two to tango.
In my post “A web of interests” I explore these incestuous relationships in a little more detail.
The problem of democracy is the extent to which it is corruptible.
The problem of Western civilization is the delusion that just a little more democracy can solve the problems that delegated decision making, (i. e.: democracy itself) created.
The regulatory state is a malignant tumor on society
It is growing out of control and eventually will destroy its host. The real problem is that most of us cannot recognize the danger and want more of it.
In my next post, I will round this up by pointing my finger at the real enemy.
Further reading (more from me)
The foundation of theories
A web of interests
Why Marxism?
..and maybe even:
The poverty of liberty