'Pay for your own damn health care'

Mark Steyn on health care in the U.K.:

Britons expect "control" over the cars they drive and the DVD players they buy and the internet porn sites they subscribe to, yet they live with a health system frozen in 1945. It's a curious inversion of priorities to demand "control" over peripheral leisure activities but to contract out the big life-changing stuff to the government.

Free citizens of advanced western democracies are increasingly the world's wrinkliest teenagers: the state makes the grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection. Hillaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912 - before teenagers or record collections had been invented.