Simon Jenkins - non-arsehole of the week

In a CiF article yesterday, Simon Jenkins spoke from his experience as a former member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) with reference to its refusal to permit a proper domestic market for donor eggs and sperm, resulting in an acute shortage of both that forces "soaring" numbers of infertile couples abroad to get the treatment they require.

If we do not pay what the market requires, we will get shortage, profiteering and unfairness. The welfare state has become monumental proof of this. Yet it still treats money as something dirty, likely to bring out the worst in people – except its suppliers. 

The public sector still lurks in the shadow of postwar socialism. The result is an imbalance of demand and supply, and profiteering by the beneficiaries. Compared with most of Europe, Britain has overcrowded surgeries, desperate universities and jammed motorways, while doctors, dentists, vice-chancellors and road contractors walk away with shedloads of money.

There's no "if". The British state is irrationally opposed to the concept of price as information. It is also a vast patronage racket run by its administrators for their own benefit, extensive to "people like us". The composition of the beneficiary group may vary slightly according to the political cycle, but the racket remains the same.

Politicians and journopukes alike rabbit on about how "fairness" is such a key component of Britishness. It's bull-shit. The defining characteristics of British society are envy and moral cowardice, both clearly expressed in the "equality" agenda, designed to appease the worst elements in society by discouraging the best.

But envy is pathological - there is always something you have that the envious will hate you for having. The Labour party is the political expression of that pathology, very effective in channeling the worst instincts of society for its own benefit. The British state is the product of that process, and since the envious cannot be made happy, all must be made equally miserable.

P.S. Just read this post in the Spectator blog about the Equalities Act, by which "Labour transferred power from parliament (where it was about to lose) to the courts (where the lefty judiciary reign supreme). Their calculation was that if they did this quietly enough, and in technicalities, the Cameroons would not wise up to it because of their aversion to detail. Cameron should have repealed the Equalities Act instantly". Indeed - but would the LibDems have gone along with the abolition?