Friday, January 25, 2008

Who’s Responsible for Triage?

The ScholarThe 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.

14 comments:

Homophobic Horse said...

Highly prescient.

Interestingly I have just learnt that Polish immigrants to the UK made up 5% of new borns on maternity wards. 5% ?? More than Muslims. Catholics don't believe in contraception do they? They also probably don't believe much in welfare. And it looks they're right.

Catholicism = The solution to our problems?

Zenster said...

From the linked article:

Social problems under socialism are the most valuable constituency because they justify the existence of government programs perpetuating a constituency of need.

[Fred Rogers]

Can you say "c o n f l i c t ... o f ... i n t e r e s t" ?

Very good. I knew you could!

[/ Fred Rogers]

He lived his life, is the epitaph of a lot of elderly men and women dying under socialized medicine or perhaps being outright murdered. Eugenics today is a dirty word, but the distinction between eugenics as practiced by Nazi Germany or practiced under socialism today, concerns the definition of “Life Unworthy of Life.”

Perish the effing thought that these socialist scumbags might for one instant consider how too many of these new immigrants regard Western people as being "Unworthy of Life", even as they flood our shores and suckle at our tax-paid government teat.

It is this preferential treatment of those who have made no active contribution that will lead entire Western populations to decide that whole nations of our enemies are "Unworthy of Life". Socialism handily drives the train of genocide without a backward glance.

pasta said...

@homophobic horse

"Catholics don't believe in contraception do they?"

According to this source the fertility rate of Poland is even lower than Germany's, at 1.26 children per woman. Similar situation in Italy and Spain.

--------

Unfortunately the article seems to confuse euthanasia with eugenics. Personally I believe that eugenics would be a neat solution to the world's problems of today, as it would allow to change a country's population make-up, without having to resort to such policies as mass deportation or genocide.

ole said...

Homophobic Horse :
Catolocism can't be a solution to anybody's problems (exept the pope's !) because ,as Pasta.-de said, the fertility rate in FULLY DEVELOPED catolic countries has dropped lover than scandinavia.
Catolic IMIGRANTS of eastern European origin on the other hand , is an allmost perfect way to BUY TIME in the demografic struggle which is going to determine europes future .
Another important weapon in the demografic battlefield is the notion of GLOBALY AWAIABLE CONTRACT LABOUR.
Why import a problematic muslim imigrant-worker if you can HIRE a much more efficient and hardworking eastasian contractworker FOR HALF THE MONEY ,
a worker that will be happy to go home to his family after 2 years ,and after having trained his replacement ?
Maybee even some of the most PC-positive holyer-than-you types might be convinced that this is a great idea,if they realise how much less tax they could be paying,how much more money they could be making ??

Diamed said...

End the welfare state, use the extra money to have more kids. Simple really.

Berit said...

Some insensitive facts:
60 % of the money used for a persons health care is used during the 4 last months of his life.

Charlemagne said...

and 80% of Medicare dollars go to 20% of covered patients

Daniel Greenfield said...

thanks to Baron for linking to the article,

to horse, Catholic countries that were once highly fertile including Ireland and Italy are now showing fairly low birth rates

there are different factors involved, but marriage later in life appears to be one of them

Mr. Smarterthanyou said...

Links to articles like this, to this kind of free thinking around the world, is one reason why GOV rocks.

How long it takes GOV to load, that's another, if not OT, topic. GOV takes about 2-5 times as long to load as any other page I hit.

Baron Bodissey said...

Mr. Smarterthanyou --

The unfortunate slow load time is due to the Pajamas Media ads. The amount of time they take to load depends on your connection, the behavior of your local DNS (I presume), and the level of traffic hitting the ad servers at the time of loading.

They can be really annoying, and I apologize for that.

However, even though the amount of money the ads bring in is small, we need it. So the PJM ads will stay up, at least for the time being.

Anonymous said...

If Britain has money to pay for an endless number of Muslim immigrants and "free" delivery of their eight children, they have money to take care of their indigenous elderly who paid into that system all their lives. The money is not the "state's" -- it's THEIR money.

Zenster said...

Baron: They can be really annoying, and I apologize for that.

Baron, please do not apologize for having sufficient wit to offset the expense of running your site any damn way you see fit. Those ads are the price of admission and it's pittance for the value received here at Gates of Vienna. Many thanks to Dymphna and yourself for all you do.

Zenster

Henrik R Clausen said...

There are many unexpected advantages to hanging out at GoV and similar places. Expanding your vocabulary is one of them.

Triage quickly divides patients into four groups:

- Morgue
- Immediate
- Delayed
- Minor

We appreciate that responding to each email is not always possible. They may even fit the above categories fairly well - we'll pester you again if we disagree with your categorisation :)

Load time? I happened to comment on it recently. But of course the ads and the income are relevant, no discussion. It's workable.

Fundamentalist Catholics don't believe in contraception. The brother of my ex-wife (Polish) had seven children, so far...

If we really have to have immigration, getting people from South America might not be so bad after all. They have a compatible culture and a warmer style of living - both in contrast with the Middle East immigrants.

Mr. Smarterthanyou said...

OT on load time, I hit many of the PJM sites, they all load faster.