Britain’s unemployment rate is 4.3 per cent, which is slightly higher than earlier in the year.
But that figure is misleading. Or, abandoning understatement, it’s a barefaced lie. The government tells it to conceal its own corruption, and also that of other people: the population at large and the medical profession.
Data from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that about a quarter of working-age adults, some 11 million Britons, don’t have a job. Of these, some 3.2 million currently claim disability and incapacity benefits. That number is growing at about 3,000 people per day, which suggests that Britain has more cripples now than in the aftermath of either world war.
By the end of the decade, it’s projected that one in 12 working-age Britons will be claiming sickness benefits, meaning that the current cost to the Exchequer, £87.2 billion this year, is only a point of departure – for the sky. That’s roughly what the state spends on education and much higher than the £54 billion it spends on defence.
Obviously, some of those 11 million people are genuinely incapacitated and can’t work. We can argue whether it’s the state or some other institution that ought to take care of them, but that they need taking care of is indisputable.
However, it’s just as obvious that millions of others have scammed the system into providing their livelihood on false pretences. Those swindlers are corrupt to the core – if there is a valid moral (as opposed to legal) difference between what they do and theft, I’m not aware of it.
But the system that allows that is also corrupt. If those millions of malades imaginaires were counted as unemployed rather than sick, our unemployment figures would go through the roof, giving a true picture of Britain’s economic doldrums.
Then there are thousands of GPs signing able-bodied adults off as sick. What makes the medics so gullible? The answer is, they aren’t gullible. They too are corrupt, for their own reasons.
A good friend of mine is a clinical psychiatrist who worked at a general hospital for decades. One young patient informed him he was on disability benefit. When my friend inquired about the nature of the problem, the patient explained he had a chronically bad back, making it impossible for him even to contemplate gainful employment.
Later in the interview, my friend asked the young man about his hobbies and was quite surprised to hear the reply: “Martial arts”. That made the diagnosis of a spinal disorder rather hard to believe but, to be on the safe side, my friend observed the patient for a few days.
When he realised that the young man’s movement was in no way impaired, he rang up the patient’s GP, let’s call him Dr Smith. My friend started to describe the patient’s prowess at sports requiring flexibility above all else, but Dr Smith cut him short. “Oh I know all that,” he said.
“Then why did you sign him off?” asked my friend, trying not to show too much indignation. “I’ll tell you why,” explained Dr Smith. “When I once tried to refuse to certify a healthy patient as disabled, he grabbed my computer and we ended up wrestling on the floor.”
One can understand the problem. Our overworked GPs see 50 patients a day, or even more. That gives them only a few minutes per patient and leaves no time at all for extended arguments and rolling on the floor in imitation of some techniques of freestyle wrestling.
To make their own lives easier, they sign the requisite piece of paper and keep their fingers crossed, hoping never to see this patient again. Their corruption is thus understandable, but that doesn’t make it excusable.
My friend didn’t ask Dr Smith if he, as an employee of the NHS, which is to say the state, was under pressure from the authorities not to be a stickler for medical detail when issuing disability certificates. That, however, is likely – as we’ve seen, the government has its own stake in the matter.
This triple lock on corruption should point to the truly detrimental effects of socialism. Those who take issue with it usually cite its economic inefficiency, and they are right. Socialism’s intrinsic imperative is shifting resources from the productive elements in the population, people fending for themselves in free markets, to the unproductive one, the state.
That’s why the wealth of a country is always inversely proportionate to the amount of socialism in it, that much is on the surface. Yet lurking underneath is a much greater harm socialism does to society: it corrupts.
Socialism, and any welfare state is by definition socialist, cynically claims a high moral ground for itself, something to which it’s not entitled. People in such a state are encouraged to abrogate individual responsibility for their actions, and they no longer recognise any transcendent moral authority.
By offering its own care, the paternalistic state perpetually infantilises people, turning them into children who count on their parents for their livelihood. And children are extra-moral or, if you will, pre-moral creatures. When they surreptitiously eat the chocolates Mummy told them not to touch, they aren’t bothered about the moral aspect of that action. They just hope not to get caught.
When they grow up, they happily pull a sickie even if there’s nothing wrong with them. They sense they are a key element in a vicious circle of corruption also involving their GP and his employer, the state. That makes it all right.
As I always say, when the state claims to do much for the people, it will do much to the people. And just about the worst thing it can do is encourage them to be corrupt.