MK’s Views - Down under on the right side

The other day I was reading about even more cameras that were going to be rolled out in Britain to catch speeders and other such law breakers. Just recently the Australian government announced new internet browsing restrictions. Naturally folks are angry about these infringements to their civil liberties and all that. I feel the same way about this, but I have to wonder why most of us in countries like Australia and Britain couldn’t see this coming. I’m not talking about most of my readers; most of you are naturally wary of big government and the state poking its nose into our lives. I’m talking about the rest of our countrymen, in my opinion they don’t get responsibility and liberty and unfortunately for us, they are in the majority.

I remember a while back, I was talking to someone about the western world, if you look at Australia and Britain; take two issues, health & security. We in Australia and Britain have handed both over to the state; I know it’s better here in Australia with private health, but in a way most of us are like the children who don’t want to leave home, the state. Let us assume for the moment that the “state” is well-meaning, only has our best interests at heart and only wants to serve us. We want all the freedoms that a teenager desires but for most of us, little of the responsibilities of an adult. That is why we have to have the surveillance cameras at every street corner, watching us day and night and why the state is going to push us around even further on health.

Like I said in the title, it comes down to responsibility, with responsibility comes liberty, you give your responsibility away, you have to give your liberty away as well. Take security, we don’t want the responsibility of owning and carrying a gun, but we also want to be safe, so we ask the state to keep us safe. We either don’t know that the state cannot keep us safe all the time, or like the petulant child, we just want them to keep us safe, now!! So what happens when someone gets raped or killed like it still happens after all our laws, we scream at the state to keep us safe. I hear it all the time on the radio, every time something happens, louts, loud noise, vandalism, crime, it’s always a variation of, the state must do something. What else can the state do other than tell us, we can’t be with you 24/7, so we need to put this camera outside your home or inside your home or on your street so that we can see if something happens to you?

You want to be safe, then give us the power to keep you safe. But it doesn’t stop there, because it cannot, criminals will always find ways around these and crime will keep going on and we’ll keep screaming at the state to ‘do something’, so they’ll have to put more cameras and more surveillance, what else can they do to calm the petulant, screaming toddlers? It’s a similar thing with health, have a look at this story from Britain, a similar policy started in an Adelaide hospital in Australia last year.

We don’t want to pay the price of good healthcare for ourselves, we want Joe Bloggs & Sally Somebody down the road to also cough up a bit into the pot so we can all have healthcare, and we want it run by the state. So the state looks at all this and says, alright, you’ve given me $1000, of that I can’t cut wages and you want the best equipment, so you’ll have to wait because we can’t do quality and quantity. That’s alright with us, but the state needs more money because over time, apart from other problems, more of us start leading a lifestyle like the following, one without responsibilities, because someone else is bearing the financial cost of it and it’s not us bearing the true cost of it.

Have a look at the pictures, that is all costing money that someone, somewhere has to pay for. Sooner or later that $1000 or billion dollars given to the state is going to run out and when the state asks for more money, we all scream at them about taxes and what not, but we still want our healthcare, now!! Think of this scenario and the unfairness of it, you who lives a healthy lifestyles, pays your taxes and has never been to a hospital turns up one day with some illness from old age. Thirty minutes earlier, one of the people in the above pictures turns up with a shot liver after years of binge drinking, if there’s only one bed, they’ll get that bed before you and you’ll have to wait. So naturally the state will have to start asking you to live a certain way, eat certain foods, get off your ass and walk, stop drinking, stop smoking, do this, do that, to make us behave and be responsible; what else can they do to calm the petulant, screaming toddlers?

I’m sure most of you who rebelled as teenagers would have heard the following from your parents, “as long as you live under my roof…” But for us it’s worse, we don’t live with the state, so once the state has advised us that we need to exercise or eat right, sooner or later they’ll need proof that you are doing this and guess what, they’ll need to put this GPS unit on your ankle to make sure you really are taking the required number of steps. So you see, your liberty is closely tied to the amount of responsibility you are prepared to take on. The less responsibility you want, the more liberties you must give up, there is simply no other way.