[wtcactus]

> 'Protection of the territory of the state' also can be served by an NHS because of the damage and danger of highly infectious diseases.

Let's be honest here. You know the NHS (and various equivalents across the world) go way, way beyond this.

And I'm not even against the existence of a public funded health service within limits. But this is just phonographic. In my country (and from what I've read in the NHS it's relatively similar), in the past 10 years we added more than 90% medical doctors and nurses to the national NHS. The budget for the local NHS increased by 72% in that same period.

And the service has become absolutely terrible and now people (the ones that only benefit from it but don't pay the costs) are asking to raise taxes even more to put even more money into the problem.

Naa, enough is enough. I don't want to support this crap.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Fair enough to complain about the execution, but glad to see you see the logic of its existence. Back to the military comparison, the waste (fraud, corruption, kickbacks, etc, etc) in that part of the public expenditure is pretty massive. Yet there don't seem to be the same outrage or call for reforms in that area. Even when multi-billion dollar programs stagger about for years then produce nothing useful (except for the profits extracted by the defense firms and their investors). Lots of hate for NHS waste, but military spending waste seems to get a free pass. Why is this?

[mothballed]

Basically, because the military got a massive budget in WWII and Americans just got used to it because slaughtering the Nazis was the only thing that can convince Americans to buy into that level of welfare.

Now it's mostly a jobs program for poor people plus pork for politicians to throw at their favored contractors/companies. Can't really be eliminated without political suicide because too many mouths are fed off of it and will make it their mission every waking moment to damn anyone who tries to do it.

Since prevention is a lot cheaper than cure we're trying to avoid the same mistake with other things rather than commit political supuku on things that already exist.