Who’s Responsible for Triage?

The press of work, both here and at my real job, leaves me almost no time to read anything except email and some of the articles that readers tip me about. The downside of the situation is having to read all that email (Hi everyone! Thanks for writing! Sorry I can’t answer all of it!). The upside is that our alert readers make sure that we see almost every important news story and op-ed in a timely fashion.

Many of the tips concern immigration and its effects on Europe, Canada, Australia, and the USA. One way or another, those are the most important stories that impact the mission of Gates of Vienna.

The recent articles seem to flow together into one unified theme. Yesterday it was illegal immigration and Geert Wilders. Today it has been “Cities Against Islamization” and the drain on the welfare state caused by increasing immigration into the EU.

And now comes the magnificent an editorial by Daniel Greenfield in Canada Free Press entitled “Alfred Must Die so that Mahmoud May Live”.

Mr. Greenfield makes a persuasive case that mass immigration coupled with the political, social, and economic logic inherent in the welfare state will inevitably lead (and is already leading) to the euthanasia of elderly people in Western countries.

Here are some excerpts from his editorial:

The problem with offering a free lunch is that someone still has to pay for it. When doled out by the government medicine comes packaged with a massive bureaucracy to implement, distribute and manage it. Whatever the system may promise, resources are never infinite and hospital wards, doctors and drugs don’t grow on trees and it has to be paid for in the end.

Socialized medicine has to carefully stagger what it gives away and lower quality and access to do so. Wards in England are a national disgrace with nursing shortages, mixed sex wards and severe cleanliness problems. France’s broken health care system is climbing the ranks of election campaign issues. Waiting times for vital procedure are a serious issue in Canada and in both New York and California, Governors have clashed with unions and hospitals over proposed cuts to state health services. When scrutinized carefully, the free lunch of socialized medicine begins to look more like spoiled leftovers.

In the 19th and the 20th centuries, civic medicine made great strides. Health care and hygiene came to the slums, diseases were fought and conquered. Much of what was accomplished was toted up as further evidence that government programs when applied to social problems could create an ideal society. That of course is the nature of the trap.

As prosperity increased, lifespans also increased and birth rates fell drastically. So drastically that Europe from the English coastline to the Russian tundra is facing the loss of millions of people and the depopulation of entire areas. This would be a severe enough problem in and of itself, but a system in which the pay of a decreasing generation of younger workers is leveraged to provide social services for previous generations of retired citizens cannot survive a gap in the birth rate any more than a building can be built with two stories missing in the middle.

Immigration was meant to fill in that gap and use the expanded population to create a bottom tier of workers paying into the system and overlaying booming third world birth rates over declining first world birth rates. But of course immigration only made things worse. On paper immigration might have seemed like an easy way to make up for a birth rate shortfall, but immigration is not a clone factory stamping out fresh new young workers to take their places at the desks and counters of tomorrow. Immigration meant importing entire families, often in three generations, from the third world, most with health care needs vastly outweighing those of the natives. And then there are the social problems.

Using immigration as a stopgap solution for the birth rate was a thirsty man lost at sea drinking salt water and only placed massive stresses on socialism’s free lunch pail. This however was more a problem for the nation’s citizens who bore the burden of government than for the government bureaucracies who serviced them. The bureaucracies were perfectly happy with the infusion of third world immigrants as the problems they brought generated an expansion of the bureaucracy. The bonus crime, diseases and social unrest was manna from heaven because the worse things got, the more funding they could demand and the more programs they could add. Social problems under socialism are the most valuable constituency because they justify the existence of government programs perpetuating a constituency of need.

- - - - - - - - -

Western nations found that not only had their social fabric been undermined but formerly peaceful small towns were becoming war zones and health crisis centers with their residents footing the bill. Prosperity created the resources and socialism took them away again. Socialism created the squeeze and immigration only made it worse. Cutting off social services for deadbeat immigrants who were a drain on the system, even the illegal ones, might have been a rational approach but few municipalities in Europe or North America would hear of it. Behind the claims of racism, was the reality that proposing to detach immigrants from the social services teat was as much a sacrilege as proposing to take away a farmer’s milk cows when he was expecting years of use from them.

But the squeeze has to come somewhere and that leaves squeezing the elderly and the disabled through euthanasia. […]

The resource shortfall has to be made up from somewhere and the elderly are the least use to the bureaucracy and the most politically vulnerable. After all there are a whole lot of them about and as the health care system becomes burdened by immigrants, someone must make way and that someone is increasingly the lifelong hardworking taxpaying citizen. As immigration further strains the health care system, choices are made. Alfred has to die, so Mahmoud can get treated for three diseases that had formerly been eradicated in the Western world.

Go over to Canada Free Press for the rest. It’s a must-read.


Hat tip: Queen.