Thursday, April 12, 2012

Kill people and save money: a libertarian proposal

Day after day, I read the same thing: government is evil per se, and we shouldn't have to pay any taxes. The old and poor are a burden on the rest of us.

So are the sick and disabled, but the time for overt Nazism isn't quite yet. However, we are making encouraging progress.

Since 1967, some 7 million unborn British children have been killed. Some of them on grounds of "serious handicap" such as having a cleft palate (shame they didn't get Lord Byron, with his club foot) - but the overwhelming majority of abortions are simply because the child is inconvenient. That's against the law as it stands, but who cares?

This old-style-Oriental solution to problems (Stalin would surely have approved) is weighted towards the lower social classes so, as the authors of "Freakonomics" pointed out, it has a beneficial side effect, in that we're executing common criminals before their career can begin. And compared with the cost of arrest, trial, appeal, imprisonment etc a little fake-objective "pregnancy advice" and a swish of the scalpel are so much cheaper, quicker and final. After all, since 1965 we can't kill adult criminals and despite what Parliament was promised in return for giving up the death penalty, "life" doesn't mean life in jail except in the rarest of cases.

Like so much other bad law and practice, self-deception, poor logic and inconsistency bedevil our approach. Apparently it's okay to terminate a foetus under 24 weeks old, because it doesn't feel pain and is therefore not alive; so with the prior use of a really good anaesthetic, we could make inroads on the prison population right now.

We're doing this already for the sick and depressed, but first we have to send them to Switzerland, sometimes accompanied by a popular children's author who lards his work with references to death and total spiritual annihilation. However, the courts are winking indulgently at those who top their relatives here and are now paving the way for advance carte blanche so the doctors involved won't be prosecuted.

Really, criminals are the glaring exception to our enthusiasm for the short way with those who trouble us.

And after that, we can have a really good go at all those born with deformities (not just the ones whose mum doesn't want them), plus cripples, orphans etc.  Worldwide, there's something like 5 million new cases of people permanently disabled each year because of road accidents alone, so there's much to do. And we could always reinstitute forcible sterilization, which was a policy in many countries but which the Germans did so much more thoroughly, as they do everything. In short, let us off anyone who costs more in taxes than he's paying.

Yes, death is not the end, it's the answer. After we have rid ourselves in this way of all social and fiscal burdens, we shall have a thousand years of peace and prosperity. Those who still have life will have liberty, and only libertarians will live.

And money, dear money, the fount and origin of happiness, the fifth element that creates and sustains all, will be safe at last.

7 comments:

Sarton Bander said...

Loon.

Paddington said...

Feeling cheerful today I see.

I would point out that the Nazis made abortion and sterilization illegal. They just did it to 'undesireables' in secret.

I have always been queasy about abortion. However, with the problems that the Human race will face in the coming decades, there need to be fewer of us. This can either be done by reducing birth rates, or increasing the numbers who starve, or die of preventable diseases. I prefer the first option, with contraception.

Sackerson said...

Perfectly cheerful; just having a go at the creeping death culture. And questioning what modern "libertarians" are really about - is it anything more than a dislike of paying taxes?

It's the "undesirables" and the two-facedness that are the key. Of course you don't want to abort future soldiers and you need the frauen for kinder kirche u. kuche.

Mark Wadsworth said...

"questioning what modern "libertarians" are really about - is it anything more than a dislike of paying taxes?"

Oh yes, even more important to them is the desire to collect taxes, i.e. ground rents, hence and why they are even more virulently opposed to Land Value Tax than to income tax. They even seem to quite like VAT.

James Higham said...

sometimes accompanied by a popular children's author who lards his work with references to death and total spiritual annihilation

Who's that?

Sackers - what is the proposal you're actually making?

Sackerson said...

Mark - I seem to have missed that, where would I see this lib enthusiasm for tax-gathering?

James - (a) Terry Pratchett - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0120dxp ; (b) ironic, as you well understand, but so much lib talk is about taxes that it looks like they just want to do away with everyone else; not so much anti-socialist as anti-social.

I think the whole lib thing is misconceived: the solitary individual has no chance against the collective. The best you can get is a better collective agreement on boundaries of behaviour. Which means working to improve the feedback between people and government. Might work it up into a post if I can be bothered.

Paddington said...

'Libertarians' covers a lot of ground. Many here in the US are anti-tax, but what we pay isn't a shade of that in the UK. The only way to achieve this is to take a total dump on the non-rich. Like any zealot, they then ignore reality, and pretend that the all-powerful free market will take care of the old, the poor, the roads, education, medical care, etc, and make it cheaper and better. None of this is supported by any evidence at all, but who worries about reality these days.