Our heritage is at stake

This lesson and warning from Britain's Daniel Hannan (EU Parliament member). This was the fellow so admired for dressing down the British PM a while back and stating so clearly:

"You cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit. You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt."

You can watch his whole speech at The Heritage Foundation and there is some great comments throughout but here's a money quote for our current manufactured health care insurance crisis. [Emphasis added]

If you decide to do this thing, you can’t do it experimentally for a year or two and then change your mind if it doesn’t work out. That isn’t our experience. That isn’t how the dynamic of the thing operates. One point four million people work for the British National Health Service. One point four million people. It is the third largest employer on the planet. The largest is the Chinese Red Army. The second largest is the Indian national railways. The third largest in the British NHS. And here’s the really scary statistic. Of that 1.4 million people, the majority are bureaucrats. There are more managers in that 1.4 million than there are doctors and nurses put together. … When you have that big a block of the electorate who feel that they have a vested interest in the status quo, you try and get any major party to go into an election promising a radical change. … Be absolutely certain before you make this change that you really do want to do it, because if it doesn’t work out, don’t imagine that people are then going to say: “Well, yeah; that’s alright; we’ll just go back to how it was.”

Sounds very much like the education blob.

Keep in mind there are only 60 million people in the UK. That's one health employee for every 43 people. Not one doctor per 43. One health system employee for every 43 people. So if we extrapolate that number to the American population of 304 million we'll get a health blob of over 7 million employees in one form or another and it will be the largest employer on the planet!

And you can be darned sure that the system will find the money to pay for all those employees before it finds the money for grandma's cancer treatment or saving preemies.

At about 27 minutes he states an NHS system in America would be un-American and warns that the NHS was begun as an emergency during war time and that power was never returned to the people.

At 31 minutes he compares the EU Constitution and the American saying the US Constitution is about the freedom of the individual. The EU Constitution is about the power of the state. We the people vs. His Majesty King of the Belgians. Bottom up vs. top down.

Hannan tells us we have a precious heritage that we are in danger of tossing away. We would do well to heed his admonition. Thankfully, many Americans realize this and are rising up to object to our government's all out effort to take our power away from us and keep it for themselves.