Starve The State!

No Room in the Maternity Ward?

The strategy of the right is to starve social services and then yell about how much better private enterprise can do everything.

The way to nip that in the bud is to outlaw private competition with the publicly provided service.

The super-rich will evade the law, even by sending their kids to the last remaining havens of international capitalist medicine (for example) like Singapore or Mexico.

But that’s a long trip to the ED after a car wreck, so even the oligarchs will be motivated, with much very loud screaming about totalitarianism and liberty and all that, to fund the public service up to a reasonable standard.

Of course, that will make the political wars over the distribution of the tax burden more fierce, and the efforts of the rich to escape taxation by such tricks as exporting their money to tiny islands in the Caribbean more imaginative and relentless.

The fight never ends.