I will. I am an emotional people-person. I do get upset, I do get short. Sometimes I am not as polite as I should be.
“Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone”.
Let HIM, not “he”. Accusative case.
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All you need is the NHS is it? You have explained why the UK is in such great shape today (not)! 
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There are multiple reasons why the UK is the way it is. I believe the existence of the NHS is one of the positives.
Would the UK be better without the NHS?
Yes, the NHS is such a shining example of the greatness of socialism! I don’t think so.
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The British NHS is a disaster. It nearly killed me. I was saved only by the fact that I knew some influential doctors who got me quickly into a private hospital.
It killed a relation of mine - a diabetic - by giving her a sugary drink! The nurses ignored the instructions on the end of the bed. Others I know and know of have died waiting to be admitted. One - a young woman - died after lying three days on a bed in a corridor without seeing a doctor
There are innumerable articles about the filth, the failure, the waiting, the misery - often even the violence of patients and sometimes of staff. True, the doctors and many nurses try to do their jobs well, but are up against administrations that know nothing of medicine but have the power to overrule those with medical know-how.
Every doctor I know who worked for the NHS - five in all - has left it in disgust.
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As Liz says, the NHS is socialism. Socialism vividly exhibiting its bureaucratic callousness. There could not be a clearer example of how everything goes bad that is managed by government.
Everything government does, it does badly. Everything. That’s the rule. Even the military. (Vide Afghanistan).
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Well, nobody, and no thing is perfect. There are multiple failures in the NHS, but you have to see this in the context of present day British society. There is not a single entity or aspect of British society today that is fit for purpose, from top to bottom it is a total disaster.
The Monarchy, the Crown, Parliament, Civil service (both central and local), The police and justice system, education, the military, the media, and on and on. Britain is an example of a former leading world power going the way of ancient Greece or Rome.
This is a nation (UK) soon to be dissolved. The prevalent attitude at all levels is “we can’t be arsed”.
I have no doubt that the NHS shortened my Mother’s life, and my Brother’s, although his ailments were certainly self-inflicted.
Why did this happen?
It was a deliberate policy of population replacement carried out by the Westminster/Whitehall cabal.
Britain is well on the way to becoming a 3rd world country because it has been (deliberately) inundated by mass 3rd world immigration.
And don’t give me the nonsense about Britain being 85% white indigenous British, it isn’t, and it hasn’t been for decades.
The UK is in appalling shape today (see my comment below).
By universal health care I particularly mean ending the employers mandate to provide health insurance. This has crippled US industry and caused massive job losses, and the loss of the technical capability that accompanys the closure of industry.
The US spends twice as much as other advanced economies on the health care sector, largely because the industry has controlled Congress for decades, for, statistically, no better outcomes.
It is also a fact that approximately 75% of the US population is already provided health care through the public purse: Consider Medicare, Medicaid, The VA, civil service coverage at Federal, State and Municipal level.
The system is a mess, but the most important thing to fix is the employers mandate, it is a massive burden on US industry.
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Corrupt governments do the military badly, that’s for sure.
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Big government solutions are always a burden because they are inefficient, nothing has demonstrated this more clearly than the COVID-19 response.
In a genuinely free market those few who were actually seriously ill would have sought treatment (mostly very vulnerable people), and cheap already available treatments would have been dispensed to them, the rest of the population would have been left alone. Not only were the expensive jabs unnecessarily forced on the majority through coercive measures, there was also a lot of additional waste in the process as well, for example:
If waste on that scale went on in a private company it would very soon be out of business. These last 2 and a half years have illustrated above all else that government should not be given responsibility for healthcare. The biggest problem I see with healthcare in the US is regulatory capture, the FDA needs to be abolished. If voting was restricted to only those who paid taxes they would soon start voting against all the waste and corruption.
You say you are a businessman (therefore you understand that things have to be paid for), and you complain about paying taxes, yet you want a wasteful big government solution to the problem of healthcare, it makes no sense.
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The employers mandate was put in place in WW2 as a “temporary” measure when the US workforce was being massively expanded. It is a disaster; bear in mind that most large companies do not get insurance, they are self-insured, and handle claims through SISCO (self insured services company). As the workforce ages and eventually retires (with continuing health care benefits) the rise in overhead costs becomes completely unsustainable. I mentioned GM in a separate comment, GM is now a pension and health care benefit distributor that happens to make a few vehicles on the side. From the world’s leading industrial conglomerate it has sunk to a corporate corpse. Other companies have avoided the health care costs by outsourcing their manufacturing, not necessarily to China either. A company I worked for, briefly, outsourced its compressor manufacturing to Finland, not a low wage economy.
There are some issues that are naturally in the purview of govt. at one level or another, whether it is Municipal, State, National or International. Private capital will never clean up pollution, construct national or continent wide transportation networks or get to the Moon, and many other things.
In any society above the most basic survivalist, authority is essential.
The response to Covid-19 is best understood as a pillaging of the population through treatment mandates, combined with largely successful efforts to suppress cheap effective treatments, with the aim of maximising profits of pharmaceutical companies and health providers, who control the politicians through their campaign contributions, and media through their advertising dollars. It may be the perfect storm in that the jabs may significantly reduce the human population, thus relieving govts. of many of their problems.
The answer to all this govt. malfeasance is better oversight and control by the populace, not a wholesale destruction of society through privatisation of authority.
I am a business man, and I am most of all a realist.
When Eisenhower was being prepped for his Presidential campaign in 1952, a group of republican big-shots wanted him to include in his platform a promise to end social security, then only a decade or so old. His response; run on such a policy and you will never win another election!
The same with the NHS in Britain, any party who ran on dismantling the NHS would not get a single seat.
Likewise any party who attempted to gain power in the US by dismantling, SS, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. would get nowhere. That is a reality.
Another reality is universal suffrage; there is no going back to the qualified vote in any form whatsoever. That is another reality.
To paraphrase Ben Franklin, we have a republic. If we can keep it.
Pure democracy is winner take all, once the party is in power it will do everything to stay in power as shown by the so-called socialist democracies: China, Communist Russia; Cuba and Venezuela.
With a republic we have a framework a constitution with checks and balances that limits the duties and power of the federal government, anything outside of those duties left to the states; and rights granted to we the people in the Bill of Rights, not government . Our republic is designed to keep government as close as possible to the people, through the bill of rights, power of the votes through our communities, the states, and representatives held accountable to the voters, not government or the parties as in a parliamentary system. And a system of checks and bounces to keep anyone or any group from consolidating power in the federal government: the executive branch headed by the president, who is also the commander in chief of the arm forces; Congress, with laws originated in the house of representatives and requiring passage of the senate; and the Supreme Court, to ensure rulings of federal courts comply with the provisions of the Constitution. That’s a lot of moving parts to consolidate, let alone all the federal agencies and different department heads, for anyone to forge one-party rule. California as a state is the closest, with its Democratic party super majority in its House, Senate and governorship which IMHO would not exist without the trillions from Silicon Valley funding the Democrat pie in the sky social engineering: high tech rail, infrastructure and swamp for the homeless, socialist indoctrination in public education, inefficient “clean energy” mandates and restrictions on affordable gas, oil, electric and nuclear power driving up energy costs; environmental roadblocks to affordable housing and new dams for fresh water accumulation and storage. Dividing the state between the cafe late limousine liberal rich with their access to the trillion dollar capital markets, venture capital and otherwise; and the rest of us who work for a living in small business or salaried positions, works only so long as prosperity allows. So far, “funny money” from Calfornia being the world’s fifth largest economy has so allowed. We’ll see in November if the socialist democratic party can overcome its gross incompetence and self inflicted wounds in managing the most prosperous, free and dynamic economy in history, engendering inflation, over the top energy costs, mandated identity politics and embedding tyrants and Islamo-fascists sits with the ultimate decision makers: we the voters.
The foundation of our republic is the rule of law; as long as we have the freedom of competition and access to the courts, one party cannot easily controller the myriads of avenues required for a top down socialist tyranny. Hopefully. Even in the era of big Tech, and the Brave New World secular mindset of the socialist Democratic Party.
That includes ballot harvesting. In the 2020 election The DemoRATS gave the America People its biggest sucker punch since 9/11, with unaccountable “mail in ballots” funded by Zuckerbucks, biased towards the Democratic Party and verified only by signature, dumped on unsupervised polling stations in the middle of the night by “consultants” and vote harvesters. Now that we’ve caught onto their game, mail in ballots even without voter ID requirements will be closely supervised, Democrat sewer rats will hopefully be exposed and accountable by well monitored polling stations and ballot boxes, and the Republican party will organize its own countermeasures for the 2022 election.
No more nursing homes with 100% voter participation.
Hopefully.
Regardless, the US Constitution and its Republic IMHO is still the best form of Democracy, if democracy can be defined as the will of the individual expressed in a government enabling and protecting individual freedom and free choice.
As Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood) put it (my paraphrase) “The system stinks; but until somebody comes up with something better, I’ll stick with it.”
Thank you Atheist Conservative for allowing this vent. This after several years’ frustration in the shallow caterwauling of the internet, belittling or ignoring common sense, natural law, tradition and western civilization for the latest “gotcha” moment or phrase. I’m still a Christian and a believer in the Bible, but that’s for another discussion.
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Welcome, clockp.
And thanks for your contribution to this debate.
So you don’t think the excellent system established by the Founders is breaking down?
Are there not Ideologues exploiting the system - largely by cheating because the system can it seems be cheated - to gain power, and using that power to change the system to one-party dictatorship?
We would very much like to hear more from you.
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Quote:
The New Deal constructed numerous federal departments and agencies to regulate the private sector for general, nebulous ends. In effect, we received a new constitution.
By refusing to legislate our legislators are escaping the sort of accountability that is crucial to the intelligible functioning of a democratic republic. The problem is now so acute, the atrophy of legislative muscle so dramatic, that major congressional votes on budgets, healthcare, environmental, social, and family policies take place with little debate or compromise throughout the body … Policies in the form of “legislation” composed entirely by staffers, spanning hundreds and thousands of pages are announced by congressional leadership of the majority party and voted on within hours or days.
No judicial doctrine alone can revive constitutional government in America and strictly limit the power of the administrative state.
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Yes, several things doomed the Republic - Roosevelts socialist New Deal, the Federal Reserve, and LBJ’s socialist Great Society, among other things. Its shocking and appalling that bills are thousands of pages long and are voted on without even being read, much less debated on - yet this is now done routinely! It’s mind boggling.
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The system established by the Founders broke down many decades ago. The acts that finally broke it were the attack on Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war. It was no longer possible to observe and interact with the world from a distance, also emergency powers were granted to the executive which have only been added to over time.
The situation now is that the Constitution is essentially meaningless. The legislative branch has abdicated its power for the appearance of grandeur. “There Shall no be Titles of Nobility”; Article 1, section 9. That has been thrown out: Every person who ever served gets to keep their title. How about we address every retired postie as “Mr./Ms Postie” for the rest of their life.
The simple fact is that the House of Representaives is far too small. When they are considering legislation they are bombarded with bribes (you really can’t call them anything else). The result is that the banking industry write banking legislation, the “healthcare” industry and big pharma write public health and drug regulation legislation. The MIC writes defense policy. Various activist groups write social policy. And on and on.
Take non-discrimination laws. If I cannot discriminate then in what sense am I free?
The 2nd Amendment, perhaps the clearest law ever written, has been eviscerated.
Jan 6th protestors languish in prison; tortured, abused, and intimidated as effectively as in any soviet gulag.
The fortunes of the American people are routinely looted to pay for “policy”. For example: The absolutely worthless country of Ukraine (about 30 million, give or take) has received approximately 1 $Trillion in aid since 1993. Where has that gone?
And the “Republican Party” does what?
Both parties have conspired to introduce a new population, of welfare dependent 3rd worlders, into the country.
Honestly; what does the future hold for the USA?
At best Brazil North.
But still, I would rather be here in Florida than anywhere else on Earth.
That’s why it’s worth debating this, the world is in flux right now and whether we like it or not our prized “democracy” is increasingly a sham controlled through the corrupt corporate media, gerry-mandering by mass immigration, and voting irregularities. When enough people start to wake up to this reality we will see support for emerging leaders who are prepared to consider fundamental changes. Those leaders are probably waiting in the wings already in fact.
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You are sure of that, Chauncey? I hope you are right!
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Yes, people are waking up, leaders are emerging.
The question is - is it in time, or is it too late?
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