• About
  • Contact
  • Staff

Law & Liberty

A Project of Liberty Fund

  • Home
  • Blog
  • Liberty Law Forum
  • Podcasts
  • Book Reviews

January 13, 2017|Egalitarianism, National Health Service

The British National Health Service Is in Crisis: What Else Is New?

by Theodore Dalrymple|7 Comments

One of the most curious political phenomena of the western world is the indestructible affection in which the British hold their National Health Service. No argument, no criticism, no evidence can diminish, let alone destroy, it. The only permissible criticism of it is that the government does not spend enough on it, a ‘meanness’ (with other people’s money) to which all the service’s shortcomings are attributable. In effect, the NHS is the national religion.

Read More

December 14, 2016|health insurance, Karl Marx, National Health Service, rationalists, utilitarians

The Rules Will Be Enforced

by Theodore Dalrymple|14 Comments

“Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping?” — Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2

In a world of perfect justice, each man would receive his due and nothing else, as Shakespeare’s words suggest. Whether such a world is possible or even desirable is another question.

Read More

May 6, 2015|Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy, Hilaire Belloc, National Health Service

Softly and Tenderly Democratic Shepherds Are Calling

by Theodore Dalrymple|5 Comments

herd of white sheep

General elections in modern democracies bore much of the population—perhaps most of it. They even seem to many a form of slow torture by means of constant and inescapable publicity and propaganda in favor of the nonentities who stand for public office. Nevertheless, it is dangerous to despise practical politics on the grounds that politicians are all the same, which is to say no good. Such indiscriminate disdain creates an opening for a more extreme and dangerous form of politics that preys upon universal discontent.

Still, in almost every Western democracy, there is a growing feeling that the political class (including its bureaucratic allies) has become more like a caste—a self-enclosed and self-perpetuating group of people that arrogates privileges to itself, through the enjoyment of which it insulates itself from the rest of the population, whose interests it has therefore no reason to share or understand. We the people increasingly believe that the division between the political class and everyone else is much greater than any factional divisions within the political class.

Read More

November 5, 2014|National Health Service

British National Health Service Offers Dementia Bounties

by Theodore Dalrymple|3 Comments

Medical concept

My favorite title of all the books that I possess is A Brief Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity. It’s by Walter B. Pitkin, and was published in 1932 in nearly 600 closely printed pages. The author promised a 40-volume encyclopedia of the subject. While he never got around to starting, let alone completing, that project, the title of the book he did finish is sufficient in my opinion to confer immortality upon Walter B. Pitkin.

Read More

October 9, 2014|Egalitarianism, National Health Service

Myths, Lies, and the National Health Service

by Theodore Dalrymple|4 Comments

nhs-bevan_1405968iThe philosopher Mary Midgley tells us that myth is not just an obstacle to thought, or even merely an adjunct to thought, but an essential part of human ratiocination itself. Whether this is actually so or not in the philosophical sense, namely that human thought is completely impossible without the making and use of myth, I do not know; but what is certainly the case is that mythology is a powerful force in human affairs, not least in politics. And myth can do harm as well as good.

In Britain, the most powerful political mythology (perhaps for lack of any other) attaches to the National Health Service (NHS). This way of organising our health care was born with original virtue in 1948, since its conception, in more senses than one, it has become more and more immaculate. If the service had a slogan, it would be Noli me tangere. No British politician would dare admit that its institution was anything other than an unmixed blessing; no British politician, at any rate none who aspired to office, would dare do anything other than tinker with it at most. Against the mythology, Mrs Thatcher herself was as helpless as a day-old kitten.

Read More

Book Reviews

John C. Calhoun, Madisonian Manqué

by Thomas W. Merrill

His institutional innovations were geared toward preserving slavery.

Read More

The Road to Iranian Democracy

by Luma Simms

The suppression of the Green Movement last time around widened the gulf between Iran's elite and its people.

Read More

Podcasts

The Solid Ground of Mere Civility: A Conversation with Teresa Bejan

A discussion with Teresa M. Bejan

Teresa Bejan discusses with us how early modern debates over religious toleration are an example of how we can disagree well.

Read More

Leading a Worthy Life in a Scattered Time: A Conversation with Leon Kass

A discussion with Leon Kass

Leon Kass discusses Leading a Worthy Life.

Read More

Eric Voegelin Studies: A Conversation with Charles Embry

A discussion with Charles Embry

What did "Don't immanentize the eschaton!" really mean? An intro podcast on the formidable mind of Eric Voegelin.

Read More

Republican Virtue, Interrupted: A Conversation with Frank Buckley

A discussion with F.H. Buckley

The real conflict in our politics centers on reforming massive levels of public corruption.

Read More

About

Law and Liberty’s focus is on the content, status, and development of law in the context of republican and limited government and the ways that liberty and law and law and liberty mutually reinforce the other. This site brings together serious debate, commentary, essays, book reviews, interviews, and educational material in a commitment to the first principles of law in a free society. Law and Liberty considers a range of foundational and contemporary legal issues, legal philosophy, and pedagogy.

  • Home
  • About
  • Staff
  • Contact
  • Archive

Apple App Store
Google Play Store

© 2018 Liberty Fund, Inc.

Subscribe
Get Law and Liberty's latest content delivered to you daily
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
No thanks