Rob's Blog

I found myself at a social gathering sitting between a civil servant and a fireman. “What do you do?” asks the fireman. “I’m a civil servant,” answers the civil servant.

Why do they answer like that? Surely you must do *something* in the civil service? Are you a tax inspector and don’t want to admit it in front of strangers, or do you do something utterly mundane and think that civil servants command respect? Or perhaps the explanation is mundane and your job is a bit hard to explain and it’s easier to be vague.

In any case, “did you go on strike?” asks the fireman. Apparently, the civil servant has to reapply for her job, and either had a day off to do that or had to go somewhere else to do it, because whatever it was that needed to be done, she chose to do it on the day of the strike. “Because I didn’t want to cross the picket line, but I didn’t want to lose a day’s pay either.”

“It’s terrible isn’t it?” says the fireman. “Something has to be done.”

“The MPs are riding roughshod over everyone,” says the civil servant. “*They* get better pensions than us. I wish I had gone on strike. I wouldn’t mind doing anything to annoy that lot.”

It really is another world.

I held my cool, only for my wife’s sake, really. I have no particular desire to be friends with such people. But if I was to say:

Reapplying for your job is par for the course in the private sector. We don’t get nice final salary pensions, either. And frankly, it sounds like you civil servants are riding roughshod over everyone, and perhaps the MPs are, for once, representing people like me who have to pay for your pensions. But they’re not going nearly far enough. There’s no money to pay for you any more. Taxes could be increased, but it would not increase revenue because we have reached the point where production is retarded enough by a tax to more than cancel out the benefit. The government is borrowing £5000 per household per year, and this cannot continue, partly because the people doing the lending are about to realise they will never get paid back. So I wish you would lose your job and go and do something that doesn’t cost me quite so much money.

If I were to say that, I would be considered a very bad and mean person and no longer welcome at the social gathering. And yet, I’m not the one whose income depends on violence against others.

The only way this state of affairs has come about is through euphemisms like “civil servant” and “tax”, and the failure of pretty much everyone to think properly.

I listen to Radio 1 partly because it is apolitical, and I mostly don’t want to hear about other people’s politics (especially the BBC’s) first thing in the morning. But this morning, Chris Moyles started talking about tax.

He was jokingly persuading listeners to give breakfast show team members £200,000 each if they won the lottery. (With 8 million listeners someone is bound to win!) Then someone pointed out that they would only get £120,000 after tax.

…and the taxman goes [knock knock knock] “I think you’ll find a little bit of that belongs to me.” How does that work? He’s not done anything for it.

I have recorded the segment to MP3.

Now Moyles is a kind of man-in-the-street sort of character as far as views on this sort of thing go. So this could be considered what the man in the street thinks about tax. Most people would probably agree. So why don’t they follow opinions like this through to their logical conclusion?

A friend posted a link on Facebook to a story about a woman who went to A&E for a broken nail. What seems to have happened is that NHS West Kent have put out a press release imploring people not to use its services unless they really need them.

Which strikes me as a pretty odd state of affairs. Imagine a business complaining of too many customers.

Anyway, I pointed out that this is a problem with “free” at the point of use health care. The flip-side is people not going to the doctors’ because they worry they’ll be wasting his time. I’ve certainly had this experience myself, where I’ve visited the doctor in the hope of getting stronger allergy medicine and left feeling like I have burdened him unnecessarily. The treatment you generally get from the receptionists boils down to the same thing. It’s more, “what are you doing here taking up space in my surgery?” than “how can I help you?”

At least with a vendor/customer relationship everyone knows where they stand. People will visit the doctor when they think the urgency of the situation outweighs the cost. The doctor will be pleased to see you whatever you are there for. 7% more customers would mean 7% more profit, not 7% more problems.

Someone replied wondering what would happen if there wasn’t an NHS, and you became seriously ill, unable to work, and therefore unable to afford treatment.

My answer is that that’s what families and communities are for. Previously such problems have been solved by friendly societies, or church congregations. Or you would have to rely on your family.

There was some discussion about whether this is a realistic notion in this day and age. There is no such thing as community, and who wants to look after ailing family members?

I think there is still community, it’s just that people are more dispersed because of modern transportation and telecoms. Your circle of close friends is your community.

But to the extent that community has been devalued, it’s probably a consequence of spending 60 years telling people they can rely on the state to provide for them: why go to the effort of being nice to your neighbours when the government will send round a nurse to look after you? I think when conservatives talk about family and community, this is what they mean, not any “Big Society” nonsense.

Similarly, no-one wants to pay for their friends’ operations. But why don’t they? It’s because the government does it for them. The expectation is there so they don’t save for the eventuality. And the high taxes don’t help with this, either.

But even if you don’t agree and think that the NHS is necessary, you have to accept that if you offer a service at no cost, there will inevitably be more demand than you can cope with.

I’m reading Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman! Actually it’s my son’s bed time story book. He’s only ten months old so I just want him to be familiar with people reading, and it doesn’t matter so much what we read.

Anyway, this bit got a folded corner, from the chapter ‘Is Electricity Fire?’. In the early 1950s Feynman gets invited to a conference on the “ethics of equality”.

There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology place, a very nice, very Jewish man gave a speech. It was a good speech, and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, while I’m telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we have atomic weapons, any war and we’re doomed, so therefore the right way out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we should all give up nearly everything to the other countries until we’re all even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses on the way home.

The next day one of the guys in our group said, “I think that speech last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the summary of our conference.”

I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there’s only X amount of stuff in the world, that somehow we took it away from poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn’t take into account the real reason for the differences between countries — that is, the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn’t the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time.

Feynman does not say these things because of party politics: he has looked at the world and this is how it works.