I return from Spain to a truly dismal amateur-hour rant against ‘free marketeers’ by Will Hutton in the Guardian.
It prompted me to opine over at Commentator:
“The collapse of a belief system paralyses and terrifies in equal measure. Certainties are exploded. A reliable compass for action suddenly becomes inoperable. Everything you once thought solid vaporises.”
Thank goodness! Will rises to the challenge and looks at the appalling fact that in some hospitals the NHS is killing its own patients on an industrial scale, and then suppresses the facts. State-imposed collectivism once again plunges into an abyss of black horror.
“As the horsemeat saga unfolds, it becomes more obvious by the day that those Thatcherite verities – that the market is unalloyed magic, that business must always be unshackled from “wealth-destroying” regulation, that the state must be shrunk, that the EU is a needless collectivist project from which Britain must urgently declare independence – are wrong.”
What? Isn’t this article all about the NHS killing its patients? Is he saying that that’s …OK?
“No Tory would say that now, not even Paterson, one of the less sharp knives in the political drawer. He runs the ministry that took over the FSA’s inspecting function at the same time as it was reeling from massive budget cuts, which he also joyfully cheered on. He finds himself with no answer to the charge that his hollowed-out department, a gutted FSA with 800 fewer inspectors and eviscerated local government were and are incapable of ensuring public health.”
Hmm. A good point here. If the FSA is serious about ‘ensuring public health’ it should shut down many NHS hospitals and prosecute for manslaughter dozens of top NHS bureaucrats.
And so on.
Just think about it.
Every day some 60 million people in the UK eat stuff. The number of products, ingredients and additives produced all across the planet and then brought together for our delectation must run into billions if not trillions of combinations.
Yet only a microscopic number of people get unwell from consuming all these products in their myriad combinations. The problems allegedly or in fact caused by this horsemeat so-called scandal are vanishingly small to the point of being statistically insignificant.
How does this happen? It’s partly down to ‘regulation’. But more importantly it’s down to the disciplne and creativity and urge for market share via delivering a reputation for good reliable products that only competitive capitalism delivers.
Rather like the very blindness and ‘objectivity of evolution being a driver for change through natural selection, ‘capitalism’ creates spontaneous order and manifold incentives towards refinement/improvement. The fact that some people along the way cheat and swindle is irrelevant, and ‘reveals’ nothing of consequence. After all, we massively regulate against murder yet now and again it happens. That’s just the way things are. Much more noteworthy is just how rare murder in fact is.
Compare all this to the daily disasters caused by negligence or decay or stupidity or sheer bad luck or individual wickedness in the NHS. Yet far from making some sane attempt to give us all context, the preposterous Hutton seems to think that if we had a few hundred more Food Standards Agency bureaucrats civilisation would be saved. To which I reply:
The stunning reality of our time is that thanks to our ever-growing inventiveness and creativity (as handily summed up by the word ‘capitalism’) we all have access to a fantastic range of excellent foods sourced from all round the planet. The truly staggering fact is that every day this impossibly complex and ever-changing supply chain works almost perfectly, thanks precisely to suppliers wanting to maximise profits and so respecting consumers by striving to deliver good products. The food chain does not ‘degrade’. It improves!
More. No sort of state-imposed ‘organisation’, be it at the national, EU or (God forbid) global level, will ever work 100 percent. How could it, even in theory?
On the contrary, this Stalinist attitude to regulation is dying on its feet. It won’t be long before ‘capitalism’ invents cheap sophisticated food-testing devices so that every shop and home can see for itself what is in these myriad products without any state intervention or regulation whatsoever. A mass global crowd-sourced approach to food quality is more likely to catch sneaky ad hoc abuse than a tiny army of centralised food safety apparatchiki.
Finally he asserts that the horsemeat problem “reveals the existential crisis in contemporary Conservatism. British democracy needs a functioning, fit for purpose party of the centre-right.”
Good grief. How can anyone so smart write such hollow nonsense?