This will probably surprise many who don’t follow goings-on overseas very closely.

Commenting on the current state of life in Great Britain a few weeks ago, Theodore Dalrymple opened an op-ed column in the UK Times Online with a stunning statement, and built on it relentlessly:

A gallop down the road to serfdom
ID cards and smoking bans are only the tip of British servitude
February 16, 2006

I HAVE LIVED under a Latin American military dictatorship where daily life was freer than in Britain today. Of course, you couldn’t go out into the street and shout “Down with Señor Presidente,” at least not without dire consequences; on the other hand, you were considerably less surveyed, supervised and harried as you went about your business than you are in contemporary Britain.

The average Briton, we are told, is filmed 300 times a day once he steps out of his door. His home is hardly his castle, either. If he doesn’t have a television he receives repeated menaces from the licensing authority, which may send an officer to inspect his house. And the form granting him the inestimable democratic right to vote comes with the threat of a £1,000 fine if he doesn’t fill it (and he’ll go to prison if he doesn’t pay the fine).

Numerous officials have the right of entry, and his most private affairs are increasingly of interest to the tax authorities, who have de facto, though not de jure, dictatorial powers. When, as rarely happens, a Chancellor of the Exchequer reduces a tax, he is said by almost every commentator to be giving money away, which implies that we all accept, like the good slaves that we are, that the economy belongs to the Government, and the fullness thereof.

But here’s the rub. For all the surveillance, there’s amazingly little protection:

Squeezing money from him is likewise the one task that the State takes seriously, for he cannot rely on the police to protect him, or the schools to educate his children, or the hospitals to succour him when he is ill, or public transport to take him anywhere without hitch. A bloated payroll does not translate into efficient services: on the contrary, it is incompatible with them.

…..This official invitation to atomise society further by sowing mistrust among the population has not yet been entirely successful; but posters such as the one I saw last weekend in a bookshop — “Racism is a crime. Report it!” — engender a vague but nevertheless all-pervasive anxiety. After all, racism is a vague term, open to many interpretations, and there is an increasing tendency to treat complainants as if their complaints were self-justifying: you have been badly treated if you think you have been badly treated. Far from being a generous and compassionate principle, this attention to, or even encouragement of, complaint confers immense and often arbitrary powers on officialdom. It is not liberating, it is infantilising.

….. We also live in a propaganda state. No one believes what a government official says any longer because he is assumed to be a liar, ex officio as it were, even when he is telling the truth. We assume that all official information is self-exculpating, self-congratulating or self-glorifying in intent, that all official speech is therefore spin or political advertising. Those of us who work in the NHS (National Health Service–Ed.) — not a small number — receive expensively produced glossy publications from our employers, full of photographs of happy, smiling workers meeting happy, smiling customers, at the very same time as drastic cuts must be implemented to meet burgeoning debts and there are patients in casualty who have been waiting for hours for admission.

….. In this context, the proposal that we should, at all times, carry identity cards containing a great deal of personal information is particularly sinister. We all know that a suicide bomber is not going to be put off by the mere possession of a biometric ID card, and that the only thing that will deter muggers is efficient policing. Are victims of mugging going to be able henceforth to demand muggers’ identity cards before handing over their cash at knifepoint?

But the requirement that we should carry such cards will no doubt give the police another target to aim at: 20 non-carriers a week, for example, producing £1,000 in fines. After all, the immense outlay on producing the cards and the interest on the resulting debt will have to be paid for somehow. You know it makes sense.

In the meantime, Britons always, always will be slaves.

When the City of Chicago wants to put surveillance cameras at every business (at the business owner’s expense, naturally; originally mentioned in the February 2 AM Coffee Links post), how far are we from being a surveillance society ourselves?

….. and the Homeschooling Movement Gets a Yet Another Shot in the Arm

Stealing shamelessly from S.O.B. Alliance member Return of the Conservatives, who blogged on this when the story broke–

Here is Reason Number for parents to homeschool their children if at all possible (By the way, the story is hopelessly slanted — The lecture was objectively biased; plus, the primary issue here is teaching the subject matter, and secondarily the political indoctrination Jay Bennish engaged in while not doing his job):

Bennish to teach again
Punishment not revealed; teacher returns Monday

An Aurora social studies teacher accused of giving a biased lecture that sparked national debate over academic freedom was reinstated Friday after assuring administrators he would give balanced viewpoints in all classroom discussions.

Jay Bennish will return Monday to his teaching duties at Overland High School, less than two weeks after Cherry Creek School District administrators placed the 28-year-old on paid administrative leave.

Speaking after a meeting with administrators Friday, Bennish said that he was “excited to be back in the classroom” and that he would continue to use his job as a way to “encourage democratic values in our society” and to “promote social justice, just as I have always attempted to do.”

“I continue trying to improve myself as a teacher,” he said, adding he would still seek to make his students “think critically.”

Disciplinary action was taken against the teacher, though Superintendent onte Moses declined to provide details. Bennish did not lose any of his salary, his attorney said.

In his lecture during a geography class last month - which student Sean Allen recorded and then made public - Bennish compared President Bush to Adolf Hitler, criticized U.S. foreign policy and said capitalism is “at odds with human rights.”

The message to indoctrinating teachers is, “Indoctrinate to your heart’s content. When you get caught, you’ll get a slap on the wrist (you might even become famous), and then you’ll have to ‘be good’ for a few years. After a while, you can resume your regular habits of indoctrination. Rinse and repeat as necessary until retirement.”

The message to taxpayers and parents who expect their kids to be taught the classroom subject matter instead of having them subjected to political rants: “Up yours. You can’t touch us.”
__________________________

UPDATE: And yet, as Michelle Malkin noted this morning, 13 year-old Raven Furbert (”The Girl with the Patriotic Beads”) is having to sue her school district to be able to wear “red, white, and blue jewelry she handcrafted as a tribute to her relatives in the military.”

UPDATE 2: Well, well — It looks a parallel treatment case has come along quite quickly (HT Joanne Jacobs):

Comments on gays broadcast at school raise furor
A teacher who condemned homosexuality as part of a broadcast at Miami Sunset Senior High has come under fire, as have administrators who failed to screen the program.

On the first day, a few students talked about supporting gay rights, and no one paid much attention.

On the second day, a school counselor talked about respecting each other, and no one paid much attention.

On the third day, a few students spoke against homosexuality and a teacher said it is ”wrong according to the Bible” — and people noticed very much.

That final segment of a Miami Sunset Senior High television project roiled the normally placid West Dade campus, drew sharp response from both students and teachers and has raised questions about the free exchange of ideas and religion in public schools.

Let’s see if these kids and the teacher get the same kid-glove treatment Jay Bennish got. Intercepts predicts: “….. head down to Miami, just so you can watch everyone change sides.”

UPDATE 3: I hope someone watches the Bennish story closely, as I suspect that Bennish or the ACLU may go after Sean Allen civilly.

UPDATE 4: Jim Spencer, who wrote this column Friday criticizing the Colorado State Board of Education for letting the Bennish issue keep other work from getting done, e-mailed me twice in response to one I sent him regarding the timing of things:

(first e-mail)
I talked to school officials Friday. Allen’s father gave the recording of Bennish to conservative columnist/Rush Limbaugh fill-in Walter Williams on Feb. 22. On that day, he also called the principal at Overland High School and said his son had a problem with Bennish, but did not give her the recording. The school division was getting calls from people who saw Williams’ internet posting before Allen’s father called the principal, a spokeswoman told me. The Overland prinicpal told Mr. Allen she would investigate and get back to him by the end of the week. But the next day Mr. Allen gave a copy of the recording to right wing talk show host Mike Rosen. Neither Allen nor his parents ever provided the school or the school district with a copy of the recording. They had to get it from Rosen on Feb. 29.

NOTE: An astute commenter caught the fact that there is no Feb. 29 this year (doh). I sent Spencer an e-mail requesting clarification.

(second e-mail)
By the way, there had been no contact between Allen, his parents, Bennish, the principal or the administration before Feb. 22 about problems Sean was having.

I think I’m supposed to conclude that Allen was a bad boy for not working things out totally with the principal first. I’d be inclined to give that criticism a little more sympathy except for three things:

• Now that we know the ultimate result (even with all the pressure, no meaningful punishment was meted out to Bennish despite a track record of indoctrinating behavior), I can say with confidence that absolutely nothing would have happeneded to Bennish if the tape had been directly turned over to the principal. At least the world now knows what a lout Bennish is, and district parents can act on that knowledge, by for example demanding that their kids not be placed in a Bennish classroom (one would hope they have that right).
• The past track record of the school in enforcing teaching standards may already have been known to be so bad that Allen knew that nothing would come of it without outside pressure.
• I don’t recall whisteblowers in general being required to turn all their evidence over to the people they are charging with malfeasance before going to the authorities or the press with their stories. So why should we feel it necessary to put restrictions on Allen’s options for blowing the whistle?

__________________________

Previous Post:
March 7 — The Breakout of the Jay Bennish Indoctrination Story — And How the AP Avoided Reporting It

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

__________________________

March 11: Wizbang Weekend Carnival Participant.

Why do people insist on seeing medical costs and fees as inflexible and unresponsive to market forces?

The subscription side of The Wall Street Journal had a great editorial yesterday on what has happened with an extremely technical and complicated “non-covered medical procedure” — i.e., one in which the government and medical insurance companies have no involvement in underwriting any of the costs.

Well, glory be. As time has gone by, the procedure involved (LASIK) has technically improved, but unlike virtually all costs for covered procedures, its cost in real terms has come down:

Another good example is LASIK, the revolutionary laser surgery that over the past decade has restored many former eyeglass or contact-lens wearers to near perfect sight. No doubt most readers have noticed the advertisements and aggressive price competition for the procedure in recent years. And it turns out competition works.

(Note: Inflation is NOT considered in the cost
figures, so while other costs were going up,
LASIK costs were stable.–Ed.)

The ….. chart tells the story. In early 1999, shortly after LASIK was first approved by the FDA, the average price for the procedure was about $2,100 per eye. By the end of last year, it had fallen about 20% to $1,687. Innovators have also responded to the demand for the service by developing a newer and more precise LASIK technology called “wavefront-guided” LASIK. Naturally, they charge more for this better, more accurate technology, but not much more than the standard procedure originally cost.

In short, the existence of a real market for the LASIK procedure has produced rapid improvements in technology and stable-to-falling costs. Between 1999 and 2004, by contrast, overall annual health expenditures per person in the U.S. increased to nearly $6,300 from $4,400, and the increase is being felt acutely by employers and their workers.

What has happened with LASIK is what The Journal predicts will happen with many other medical procedures and services if Health Savings Accounts ever catch on — more competition, lower prices, and more innovation:

The LASIK experience also refutes the criticism of HSAs that individuals without comprehensive insurance coverage are likely to underconsume health care to their own detriment. If so many people are willing to ante up for optional procedures like LASIK, surely they’ll be able to get used to more direct spending on urgent medical needs as well. Just as surely, everyone stands to benefit from a health-care marketplace in which LASIK surgeons and dentists aren’t the only medical providers competing aggressively for business.

Proponents of government-run health care keep insisting that medicine is different from everything else in the economy in being immune to market forces. But the LASIK example shows that where a market in health care is actually allowed to function, with transparent pricing and incentives to spend wisely, the market works very well. The goal of public policy should be to make sure there’s such a market across the entire health-care industry.

While the “conventional wisdom” insists that the only way to rein in medical cost increases is to increase government and third-party involvement in paying for services, the LASIK experience shows that exactly the opposite is the case. The freer the market for medical care and services, the lower prices will be.

From the Bear Creek Ledger (HT S.O.B. Alliance member MilTracker):

Steven Silver, a psychologist at the Coatesville veterans hospital who served as a Marine Corps flight officer in Vietnam 36 years ago, is expecting final word that he has been accepted as a recruit in the Pennsylvania National Guard.

He is already a year past the age at which even most top generals usually must retire. But state Guard leaders, citing a “critical wartime shortage” of doctoral psychologists with Silver’s expertise in combat stress, have urged the Pentagon to waive the age requirement in his case.