Why Xii

By John Weyland

This book contains seventy-six pieces. They are all meant to say something new and to be things useful for understanding the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546234050

John Weyland

(Author did not want to provide. All his other books for this series did not have ATA)

Book preview

Chapter 1

National health care solved the problem it created.

The problem is that no country can provide its people with the best health care available.

National health care solved this problem unintentionally. It caused more people to be waiting for medical treatment than could get it. The wait became so long that many of them died before they could get treatment. That was how costs were kept down.

The treatment is limited not only by the number of doctors but by the equipment and medicine involved. The medical profession has made tremendous progress. But the cost has become very high. One way of keeping down that cost is to make patients wait. They can’t get the expensive treatment if they can’t see a doctor.

The governments in countries with national health care have softened the effects of this system for the better-off. Doctors are allowed to have private practices. So those with money can get the best treatment with no or very little waiting.

It might seem that the public would not accept this system. It does because most of them do not have the ailments which require the very expensive treatment. So they get treated.

So the public does not rebel.

If the national health systems had been presented accurately they would have been indignantly rejected. But they were presented originally as the best health care for all. That’s how they were accepted. Then they evolved. And there is enough satisfaction to keep them being accepted. Because most people don’t have the ailments that require very expensive treatment.

Chapter 2

Democracies have to go easy on the rich.

They find this hard to do because most of the voters are not rich.

Democracies have to go easy on the rich if they want to keep enjoying the prosperity they have.

With the Industrial Revolution large-scale investment became necessary for prosperity.

This was new.

For most of the history of the human species what the human species had was land.

Land provided production.

There was some investment. But the part of production that came from investment was very small compared to the part that came from land.

That was no secret. It was known to all.

Then the Industrial Revolution happened and the situation changed. It turned around. Investment—large-scale investment—became necessary. Whereas 90 per cent of the population had been working on the land, less and less were—down to 5 per cent.

Nature provided land. Investment had to be provided by people.

For people to provide investment they had to put aside part of their income.

They were not used to this. It did not come naturally to them.

They devised a system under which they could make money by investment. By giving up part of their income now they could get more income later.

This system worked well for a long time. Production increased. Population increase.

But changes came that hurt investment.

People no longer had to look after themselves. Their governments would look after them.

When people had to look after themselves they saved money. They put it in banks. The banks invested it by loaning it out.

Bank investments had a multiplieter effect. Banks could loan out more money than people put in them.

When people had to look after themselves the rich invested more money. They were not taxed because governments did not need money to give to the people.

And when people had to look after themselves, corporations invested more money. They were not taxed, or taxed as much.

Altogether, a lot of money was invested. Production increased on a large scale. Countries rapidly became more prosperous.

When governments started looking after people this happy state of affairs ended. Governments taxed more. Less went to production.

Money given to people does not have the same effect as money invested in production.

If money is taken from some people and given to other people it does not increase production. The amount remains the same.

If money is just printed it increases production only by however much it is.

The result of the new situation is that production does not increase very much in economically advanced countries.

To keep those countries—almost all of which are democracies—at or near their present levels of production the rich have to be treated with some discretion. They have to be taxed less than they could be taxed.

This is in the interest of the whole population. But they do not see it like that.

Soak the rich is what they favor.

It is a self-defeating policy.

Chapter 3

Rights aren’t what they used to be.

Rights used to be protection against abuse of power.

Rights have come to be a means to get special favorable treatment from a government.

Both kinds of rights are supposed to be something that has a real, separate existence.

Originally, they were called natural rights.

Just what this meant nobody knew. You were to take it on faith.

Actually, it worked—if enough people believed it.

Because the rights people get are the rights people give themselves.

Originally, rights were invented to curb monarchies. Monarchies could do whatever they wanted.

For 10,000 years there was really nothing to restrain monarchies.

But by the 18th century the world was finally changing.

The American colonies were in a position to break away from England.

They had enough people to fight the British army—as much of it as could get across the Atlantic Ocean.

They had enough wealth to right that much of the British army.

They were too spread out to be ruled by a king.

They had too much land to be ruled by an aristocracy. When that land was free.

So they decided to become a republic.

Why be ruled by others if you can rule yourselves?

And they conferred those famous rights on themselves so they could remain a republic.

All this worked pretty well for a long time.

But the republic allowed a system to develop within it that would bring about its ruin. That was banking.

Anybody could see that banking would destroy the economy at intervals. It created a lot of what passed for money. Then it destroyed that money. So suddenly the economy could not buy what produced. And it took a long time to replace the money that had been destroyed. During that time the economy could not buy enough to keep everybody working. There was what came to be called a depression.

During the 19th century the country could live with depressions. They were not on a gigantic scale. And there was still free land. People without jobs could still go back to the land. That’s where most of them had come from.

But by 1929 the country had run out of free land. And there were too many unemployed to go back and live with their families.

What was the country going to do?

Let the unemployed starve?

So the government started giving the unemployed money to live on.

That was the beginning.

Everybody thought it was temporary. The economy was supposed to work its way back to normal.

The economy eventually did work its way back to normal—thanks to World War II. Wars bring full employment. The government needs all that production in wars. And half the work force is in the armed services. So there are plenty of jobs and not enough people to fill them.

When World War II ended the government could have corrected the problem that caused the Great Depression. Which was banks creating too much money. Money that would be destroyed sooner or later by a crash. But banks liked doing that. Because it made them well-off for a while. The bankers could put aside enough so that when the crash came they would still be well-off.

The general public did not understand what was going on. They liked the prosperity and did not realize it would not last.

So the measures that were supposed to have been temporary became permanent. There were not only big depressions to deal with. There were little depressions. So there were always unemployed and they could no longer go back to free land.

Something else