The State: How Everyone Seeks To Live at the Expense of Everyone Else (British Spotlight)
Theodore Dalrymple starts an article on TakiMag:
The British government has managed to spend approximately $50 billion on a system for testing and tracing cases of COVID-19. So far, the average citizen has been tested five times. Yet mysteriously, the British mortality rate is either above, or very similar to, that of countries that have tested and traced much less often. A parliamentary commission reported that there was no evidence that the whole system had had any beneficial effect whatever.
This was a very hasty and naive conclusion. It assumed, for example, that the real object of the system was to prevent illness and save lives. But if one puts aside this facile prejudice, one may come to the conclusion that it was an enormous success, for—in now traditional fashion—it shoveled enormous quantities of public money into private pockets, no doubt seriously enriching large numbers of people. If one assumes that the purpose of the expenditure was to create or reward a clientele class, not only does everything become clear, but it changes one’s opinion as to whether or not the whole thing was a success—in its own terms, of course.
This is not the first time such a thing has happened, nor will it be the last. For example, the government of Mr. Blair attempted to unify all the medical records of the country’s National Health Service, and spent more than $16 billion doing so, without a single thing to show for it—from the totally irrelevant point of view of streamlined medical records. From the point of view of a clientelistic relationship with a class of technocrats and miners of the public purse, though, for whom nothing succeeds like failure, it was a wonderful success. It would be interesting to know just how many millionaires were made by the whole scheme.