Money for nothing

A woman at work was saying last year how in France the medical system is free. She was going on and on about how little the French pay for medical treatment and how much they get. It must be really nice to believe this. I am afraid that I just cannot.

You know what you get for free? Not much good stuff is for free. You must pay in one way or another for quality. You can find a diamond in the rough once in a while, but to base our medical system on this is folly. And it really is not free. You pay in the much lower quality you will receive. The problem here is that this is the long-term view. If we made health care free, we would enjoy the reserve of medical professionals and resources that have been built up over generations of capital reinvestment. However, the money to maintain this excellence would slow to a trickle. It would take time, but a serious decline in innovation would immediately begin to follow. Lack of resources would become chronic as time went on. Quality would naturally suffer. All we have to do is look at England and see what we will be getting.

The riots and looting going on in England right now resemble the problems in Greece earlier this year. These countries have crippled their economies by allocating the resources of the nation through the central government. Poor investment is the norm rather than the exception. We have been seeing this within our own country now for decades. We did start the process at a later time than they did. Not to mention that our economy is much larger so it would take a longer period of time before the process reaches the point that England and Greece are at today. And make no mistake. We are heading that way. The financial crises that we have been seeing and the instability in the markets today are the warning signs. The point here is that you can’t keep getting something for nothing. Sooner or later you will pay, in one way or another.